The Eisenberg Family Depression Center hosted their annual Mental Health on College Campuses Conference at the Rackham Graduate School April 1 and 2. For the past 21 years, the national conference has invited students, staff, counselors and social workers to come together and discuss the latest mental health research.
Stephanie Salazar, manager of outreach and education programs at the Eisenberg Family Depression Center, said in an interview with The Michigan Daily that the theme of this year’s conference was “From Insight to Action,” highlighting the importance of mental health support on college campuses across the nation.
“We should be spotlighting mental health all the time because it’s a huge public health issue and we really want to take care of the whole student body, not just with academics,” Salazar said. “The theme this year was from Insight to Action, so it was really talking about, ‘How do we use data and data collection to form interventions for students?’ and ‘How do we manage emerging issues like (COVID-19), loneliness, gambling addiction?’ — all those things as they come.”
In a video message from Arif Iqball, U-M alum and creator of the Naveed Arif Iqball Mental Health Advocacy Endowment Fund, said the event is a way for people to gather and reflect on their experiences with mental health. Iqball lost his son in 2019 to depression and said the purpose of the event is important to challenge feelings of despair and hopelessness.
“This lecture honors my beloved son Naveed whose kindness, compassion and bright strength continue to inspire our collective mission today as we gather here, united by our shared commitment to understanding and improving mental health,” Arif said. “Despair can feel overwhelming, isolating, even paralyzing and it can silence voices, close doors and convince us we are alone. Yet despair, challenging as it may be, also carries within it an extraordinary potential because it invites empathy, sparks compassion and can become a powerful catalyst for profound personal and collective growth.”
This year’s keynote speaker was professor of psychology Ethan Kross, director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory, and two-time national bestselling author of “Shift” and “Chatter.” Kross began by explaining the concept of linguistic distancing, the practice of regulating one’s emotions by using language to separate from an idea or conflict.
“In general, step one is actually believing that you can change the way you think about your circumstances, to change the way you feel,” Kross said. “One of my favorite (tools) is, when you are suffering, what advice would you give to a close friend or loved one? We are often really great advisors to other people, but when we ourselves are suffering, we give ourselves terrible, terrible advice.”
Kross highlighted recent research focused on the difference between being alone and loneliness. According to Kross, mainstream media sources tend to talk about being alone in a very negative way. To conduct further research on this, Kross hopes to conduct an experiment creating two articles that illustrate loneliness in different lights: one positive and one negative.
“What we then do is we track people over the course of several weeks and we measure how we feel,” Kross said. “If you think being alone is bad for you, the more time you spend alone, the more lonely you become. But if you think being alone is good for you, it’s an opportunity to rest and restore and be creative, you actually feel better the more time you spend alone.”
Kross also discussed the detrimental mental health effects of social media, advising people to refrain from comparing themselves to others and reframe their thoughts about their own lives.
“Life is good, and then you see your nemesis who is outperforming you in some way, and you inevitably feel bad about yourself, so you engage in a social comparison that elicits feelings of envy,” Kross said. “The hack for dealing with that is to reframe that comparison, so instead of thinking, ‘Oh my God, this person is doing all these things that I’m not doing, their life looks so much better,’ you reframe and say, ‘Wow, they were able to do this, so can I right?’ So actually convert the comparison into a source of motivation that you can try to achieve.”
Nursing senior Tess Carichner, a member of the Digital Accessible Futures Lab, was a student panelist at the event and presented on the Accessing Disability Culture anthology she has worked on since last year. In an interview with The Daily, Carichner said there are many important strategies, such as Communication Access Real-time Translation, for improving accessibility across mental health resources.
“I was able to teach accessibility, strategies and tools so that the audience members who are predominantly social workers, therapists, Student Affairs staff, health care workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, can employ those strategies when, you know, reaching out to college age students with disabilities,” Carichner said. “I talked about flexible deadlines, using CART captioning, making sure that all digital publications are screen reader accessible for blind and low vision students.”
LSA senior Lillie Birnie was named the George Orley Student Mental Health Advocate Award winner during the event. Birnie told The Daily her personal experiences have shaped her mental health advocacy and said she is grateful to have the opportunity to help and support others with their own mental health journeys.
“I’m so grateful that I am here to do these things and I’m realizing that mental health advocacy work on campus is not only helping the current students, but also the way it’s providing hope for families who have lost students on the campus because the resources weren’t available.”
Daily Staff Reporter Halle Pratt can be reached at hallehap@umich.edu.
