Sometimes you just need someone to listen to you. It may be one person or it could be a group of people you can easily identify with and feel comfortable sharing personal feelings and information.
Every-day life of being a teenager can be stressful on its own. Add in that you are living away from home — sometimes hours away — with 200-plus people from all kinds of backgrounds and beliefs who you don’t know while attending a school with a rigorous academic schedule. It can become a bit overwhelming.
It’s no wonder that many students said adding mental health services to campus were a necessity.
Staci Stich began in April 2018. She has a bachelor’s in psychology from Louisiana Tech University and a master’s degree in counseling from the University of Arkansas. Prior to coming to ASMSA, she was a counselor at a school in Mississippi serving children with emotional disabilities as well as students on the autism spectrum.
Stich has an additional 30 years of experience in community health, focusing primarily on working with children and adolescents in southeast Arkansas, northwest Arkansas and South Carolina. She also has worked in residential care in Louisiana and two years with the Arkansas Department of Human Services.
When she first arrived at ASMSA late that spring semester, many students weren’t comfortable coming to visit her. Most of the students she spoke with were recommended by staff and faculty members to visit her.
In the fall 2018, Stich began introducing groups that would meet at lunch time. She would send out an email to all of the students encouraging them to attend the various meetings. She told students they could meet with her first if they were interested, but what she found was that students were more relaxed coming to the groups.
Once they attended a group session, they usually came back for additional meetings. “There was no commitment required. I told them it was up to them to choose if they come back or not. Attendance might drop off at the end of each semester, but then it would pick back up the next. Individual sessions would increase a lot at semester test time,” Stich said.
“Group members began to encourage other kids to come or to bring someone to come to the meetings with them. They would come up with their own assignments to do before the next meeting with each other. They always followed through with it and completed their tasks.”
Students would exchange phone numbers and seek each other out to do things. They’d also ask each other for help while studying, she said. Having the meeting allowed the participants to develop a core group of if not friends at least colleagues to whom they could reach out.
Dr. Rheo Morris, dean of students, was one of the early advocates of providing licensed professional services to students. Prior to coming to ASMSA, she worked at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. She had opportunities to interact with UCA’s Schedler Honors College participants.
“I have seen in the past the type of pressures they place on themselves and that others place on them and how sometimes they struggle to juggle these pressures,” Morris said. “UCA’s Counseling Center did a great job with these students through teaching them coping skills and simply just listening to them while normalizing students asking for help.”
Destigmatizing the use of mental health services is one of the main challenges Stich must work to overcome. Morris said she saw that on the college campus as well which is another reason she felt it was important ASMSA have a mental health professional on campus.
“I felt that some of this normalizing should have occurred before the got to college. Having a counselor on campus helps to remove the stigma from asking for help because it is no longer a huge event to get into seeing someone just chat. I think mental and emotional health are very important because they affect every aspect of your life — your thoughts, your emotions and your behaviors,” Morris said.
As the first year progressed, Stich noticed students becoming more willing to visit with her one-on-one. It might just be dropping by between classes to visit with the door open or it might be a more serious matter that required a closed-door session. Regardless, students were becoming more comfortable with the idea of seeking help when they needed it.
“A lot of them didn’t feel comfortable talking about situations before coming here. Now they feel more comfortable discussing some of it,” Stich said about both one-on-one sessions and group sessions.
Whether it’s in a group session or individual visits, she encourages each student to work on their problem-solving skills and focus on what you can do to improve a situation rather than looking at what you can’t do.
“They need to understand what they can take control of. They’re used to parents asking have you done this or have you done that. They need to learn to come up with a plan and work on one thing at a time,” Stich said.
Morris said she and her staff are very appreciative of having Stich on staff because she educates the residential life staff on signs of mental distress and helps them build coping skills for living and working in the same place.
“Having Staci around creates an environment where students know that there is always someone to support them outside of the people they live with. The majority of students love having her around to just chat with. Group sessions are amazing, and I think in time more students may take advantage of her services and group sessions as we continue to normalize mental and emotional health conversations,” Morris said.