Discrimination, mental health are linked, report finds. What is Penn State doing to help students?

Apr. 10—College students who have experienced identity-based discrimination have increased levels of general distress, social isolation and suicidal thoughts at the beginning of mental health treatment, a recent report from Penn State's Center for Collegiate Mental Health found.

The report, which used data from 195 college and university counseling centers, puts resources for students with diverse backgrounds and DEIB initiatives in the spotlight at Penn State and other universities.

Developed in 2004, CCMH works to create a standardized database of college mental health data to serve as a resource for information and research. This year's de-identified data was collected from 195 college and university counseling centers, describing 185,114 college students seeking mental health treatment.

According to Brett Scofield, the CCMH executive director, the two-year data collection effort found that about one in five students nationally reported some form of identity-based discrimination in the past six months when surveyed at counseling centers.

Of those, 10.3% reported experiences of discrimination or unfair treatment on the basis of gender, while 9.2% reported such experiences for race/ethnicity/culture, 6% for sexual orientation, 3.7% for nationality/country of origin, 2.8% for disability and 2.7% for religion.

"At its root, (this annual report) was an awareness raising effort to understand how often students are having these (discriminatory) experiences to make clinicians aware of this, so that they can engage in dialogue with their clients about these experiences," Scofield said.

While symptom improvement shows that counseling services effectively support students who have experienced discrimination, there are persistent outcome disparities in comparison to other students receiving treatment.

According to the report, those who reported discrimination consistently ended treatment with higher average levels of distress, social isolation and suicidal ideation than those who did not — a trend Scofield said needs to be addressed at universities across the nation.

"We do know that counseling centers can treat those symptoms ... but that's only one part of the solution," Scofield said. "It's clear that institutions need to support DEIB informed initiatives in order to help close those outcome disparities."

JT Thomas, a senior at Penn State, believes that the university can do more to support students from marginalized communities and minimize the impacts of discrimination at a predominantly-white institution by marketing the resources available, raising awareness and better intervening in instances of discrimination.

"I think the university needs to do a better job of preventing harassment and preventing that feeling of being unsafe before it happens ... whether that's imposing stiffer penalties for organizations that display discriminatory actions ... or just more education," Thomas said.

Student challenges and finding safe spaces

To Thomas, the university and the State College community are "fairly welcoming environments" for LGBTQ+ students.

However, there are a handful of spaces, like Greek life, that make Thomas and other students who are part of the LGBTQ+ community uncomfortable.

Thomas is an employee at Penn State's Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, which offers a safe space for LGBTQ+ students to connect with one another and with staff, who can help gender diverse students change their pronouns and names in Penn State's directory, among other things.

Thomas, who uses the pronoun they, said using the resources at the CSGD while they were figuring out their gender identity could have made the journey easier.

"The center has been very supportive of me. It's just been a place where I can freely express myself and not feel judged for it, which is really nice," Thomas said. "It's not something that you get very often."

CSGD also helps facilitate the Ally House Living Learning Community, which "provides an open, safe, and inclusive living environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and ally students," according to Penn State Housing, Dining and Residence Life.

"From what I've heard, living in the dorms — especially for a genderqueer person — can be a little bit of a struggle ... their roommates have either moved out or just not talked to them or been fairly hostile," Thomas said. "It's important to have a designated space where you know you can go and you can be safe, and you're not going to be challenged or shoved to the side or threatened at all."

Penn State's Counseling and Psychological Services on campus is often a starting point for students of all backgrounds who are facing mental health issues. And Natalie Hernandez, CAPS' senior director, said there is an emphasis on serving students from diverse backgrounds.

From biweekly DEIB focused training to maintaining liaison relationships with other campus resource centers, Hernandez said there's no end to professional development for staff.

One of the primary ways in which the counseling center serves students is through its groups program, which includes Black and Latino Male Empowerment, Women of Color Empowerment, Women's Empowerment, Queer Space and Interfaith Dialogues.

While each centers conversations on the identities represented in the group, students of all demographics are welcome — anyone who feels like they may benefit from such conversations.

"We work hard to make sure they're inclusive and safe spaces," Hernandez said.

Sultan Magruder is CAPS' assistant director, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and spearheads liaison relationships with campus resource centers, including CSGD.

"We understand that social isolation, loneliness can really be an artifact of discriminatory experiences. And so being able to get individuals connected in spaces in which they feel safe and validated, that's one way in pushing back and combating the effects of discrimination," Magruder said.

In addition to supporting students, these spaces also make staff aware of population-specific needs to help curate programming and cultivate relationships that effectively address student needs and experiences.

"We have several partnerships with the different equity based cultural based centers here at Penn State, and that's helpful in that it provides routes and pathways for our partners to refer students when they see that they're struggling with mental health concerns," he said.

One of these relationships is with Penn State's Multicultural Resource Center, which helps facilitate the Black and Latino Male Empowerment and Women of Color Empowerment groups.

For the MRC's Director Melissa Landrau, these groups are an important part of the center's goal in providing a space for students to talk about their experiences and fostering a sense of belonging.

"(Groups) are spaces (that) students find valuable because they find that they can come and talk to other students that perhaps have had similar experiences to them in a predominantly white institution," Landrau said.

In addition to collaborating with CAPS to facilitate groups and provide referrals, the MRC helps students navigate academic challenges and financial aid.

For Landrau, centers like the MRC, CSGD, the Paul Robeson Cultural Center, the Gender Equity Center, Student Disability Resources and others are necessary to address the needs of minority students holistically.

"We see it. We know how instances of discrimination and bias and racism and violence deeply affect our students of color," Landrau said. "We cannot separate discrimination and mental health."

Moving beyond campus resources

But the efforts of CAPS and campus resource centers can only do part of the work.

For Scofield, it's critical for leaders who prioritize mental health to also support DEIB informed initiatives.

While CAPS' collaborative approach provides a safe space for students to work through symptoms associated with discrimination, it's difficult for the center to address the root of such bias at a campus like Penn State.

"All of those close collaborations and close relationships, they don't solve as much of the upstream (needs) as we wish they did, but we know that our job is to do both downstream (interventions) and continue constantly to walk upstream and say, what can we be doing differently?" Hernandez said.

According to Scofield, CCMH will continue to investigate the connection between discrimination and mental health and plans to research intersectionality in the future.

Though the report did not look at intersectional identities, Scofield said the data alluded to a compounding effect of discrimination experienced by students who experienced multiple areas of discrimination across two or more identities.

"I hope that this report and the continued advocacy and efforts for counseling and psychological services in spaces (for minority students) continues to be strong and ... the university continues paying attention to that because I don't think it's gonna go away," Landrau said.

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