CHICAGO -- Cree Medley, 24, struggled with depression and anxiety throughout her time in college. While she was a student at the University of Illinois Chicago, the struggles started in 2015 and came to a head in 2016 in a suicide attempt.
“After experiencing intimate partner violence, I also developed PTSD,” the Chicago resident said. “The resources on campus, once I was officially diagnosed, weren’t very plentiful. I tried making an appointment with our counseling center and had to wait weeks for an appointment. Once I did receive an appointment, I didn’t receive counseling but instead received referrals to different psychiatrists and therapists. It took me several more months to finally get consistent professional help.”
Medley’s search for professional help in 2017 eventually led her to a regular therapist and psychiatrist, but she said it still took years of seeing both for her suicidal ideation, years of trying different medications and treatment options before finding something that worked for her to make her depression and anxiety manageable — which didn’t really happen until 2020, the year she graduated.
“It was a matter of not having enough resources,” Medley recalls about trying to find mental health help on campus. “The demand is much higher than the resources available.”
Medley’s mental health journey is one she’s shared with legislators over the past year as part of a campaign to fund the Mental Health Early Action on Campus Act, which was signed into law in 2019 and requires all public 2- and 4-year colleges and universities in Illinois to improve campus mental health education, supports and screening for students. The act centers on:
• increasing training and awareness among faculty, staff and students
• building better mental health screening to better identify students in need
• improving capacity to provide mental health treatment and peer support on campus
• creating a statewide Technical Assistance Center to assist in implementation and quality assurance
The measure, also known as HB5424/SB4055, was filed in the Illinois House and Senate in January to appropriate $19 million in the state’s 2023 budget to fully fund the act. The campaign is a collaboration between the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Chicago and the advocacy group Young Invincibles.
“We were really glad to pass the original act in 2019 because it allowed us to create a vision of what is the best practice. What would it actually look like to have a campus that’s conducive to student mental health?” said Rachel Bhagwat, policy director at NAMI Chicago.
“In 2019, when the initial act was passed, the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability did a comprehensive survey with all 58 institutions in the state. They had those institutions compare their existing mental health programs on campus with the 11 goals of the act, rate themselves on where they were at on each of those goals and what kind of funding would they need to get there for the next three fiscal years.
“The $19 million comes directly from what was self-reported by these colleges and universities as the amount that they would need to move forward toward really reaching the goals of that act. There’s also a half a million dollars in there that would go to the Illinois Board of Higher Education for a technical assistance center, because we know that these universities and colleges want to improve mental health on campus, but they need to know how, they need to know specific best practices and have support along the way.”
Illinois state Rep. La Shawn Ford, 8th District, filed the House version of the bill in January. On April 5, he led a virtual meeting about appropriations with the Higher Education Committee, where administrative representatives from Illinois campuses and other individuals discussed the need for assistance with mental health resources for their respective academic populations.
Dr. Victoria Folse, director and professor of nursing at Illinois Wesleyan University, said she’s seen unprecedented rates of students not progressing as scheduled in school. She said it is without question a mental health crisis. “We ask the committee to extend funding to the private and independent universities so we can be part of the solution for mental health access and mental health equity.”
She said her school would hire more counselors to meet face to face with their students as well as invest in more telecounseling services. She said she wants to encourage legislators to approve funding so her school can enhance the mental health action plan it established for athletics and across academic units.
“We have a significant and growing unmet need and believe that it will not dissipate even when our mitigation efforts are reduced,” Folse said. “These are students that are hurting and will continue to hurt into the future.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists and the Children’s Hospital Association have declared children’s mental health a national public health crisis: in a recent American Council on Education survey, 62% of institutions reported that student mental health is “worse” now than in previous years, and 73% of university presidents identified student mental health as a top five issue on their campus, making it the most pressing issue currently facing campuses.
“This has become real to us on our campus,” said Dr. Gregg Chenoweth, president of Olivet Nazarene University. “When you get beyond data, this is a severe and urgent thing for us.”
Mental health is an institutional priority for Olivet Nazarene, he said, calling it a moral issue in that administration couldn’t stand aside knowing how bad it is.
“Our number of mental health service appointments have jumped from pre-COVID around 2,000 sessions per year, to now well over 3,000. If you go back five or seven years, it’s doubled. Almost all of it — the diagnostic prevalence — is anxiety and depression,” Chenoweth said. “Because of the volume, we’ve had at a time a waiting list of 100 students. I think right now, it’s 48; 1 in 10 of the students on our campus who are getting counseling have had suicidal ideation. You’d think in a campus that is organized for small groups and caregiving you’d have less of this. But a generalized, small group orientation for campus life is not the same as technical competence to counsel.”
Chenoweth is calling for mental health funding because he has plans to hire more counseling staff to help students if the $19 million is approved. Just one more counselor could aid 150 students next year, he said. He also has plans to create a certificate program so all Olivet employees have diagnostic competence to know when to refer a student for help.
“I’m calling this a tourniquet time — it’s ugly and messy, but in the urgency to save lives or heal, you just have to do something. Later, we’ll perfect it,” he said.
“How can students really perform at their highest level if they’re struggling with mental health and behavioral health challenges?” Ford asked. “We believe that $19 million for public universities is a start. We don’t believe that it’s enough. But we do know that it will allow for these public universities to provide services for the students. We know that it’s time to fund this. We will have the money. Help is on the way.”
The vote for appropriations funding is scheduled to take place Friday.
While Medley took time off as an undergraduate to prioritize working on her mental health, she is now deciding on which law school to attend in the fall. She has her sights on working in domestic and international human rights law after she receives a dual law degree and master’s in public policy to become a human rights advocate and lawyer.
She wants people to reach out to state legislators to support the mental health appropriations bill, to learn more about it and the impact those resources would have on college and university students, allowing them to graduate on time, to survive.
“I’m not the only one whose life has been on the line due to mental health issues,” Medley said. “It really is a life-or-death matter.”
