Mental Health | LearningWell Magazine

A Simple Step for Schools to Save Lives

Posted on January 20, 2026January 21, 2026 by Mollie Ames

Peter McGinnes is a pre-medical neuroscience student at Stanford University whose lived experience with a suicide attempt has shaped his path. Today, he channels that experience into advocating for better access to mental health care, particularly for students.

Every year, thousands of students in mental health crises are left searching for resources. What if, printed on their university ID card, were three digits that could make reaching out for help just that much easier?

People often imagine suicide as dramatic or obvious, but that usually is not the case. Most students struggle silently, showing up to class, keeping up appearances, while feeling increasingly isolated and overwhelmed. That silence is exactly what makes it so hard to notice, and why accessible resources matter.

I know, because I’ve been there. As a teenager, I felt trapped, convinced no one could understand. My grades stayed high, my face appeared calm, but internally, I was breaking down. Mental health resources were hidden behind webpages and brochures that no one gave a second thought. I didn’t know there was a national hotline, much less that calling it could mean someone would listen.

I spiraled until I couldn’t anymore. I attempted to take my life and spent two months in a residential treatment center. For the first time, I was surrounded by people who could relate to my pain. I learned to sit with my thoughts instead of drowning in them. I left stronger, but still fragile.

Months later, I saw a poster in my doctor’s office: “988 – National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.” The numbers stuck with me like a song lyric you hum without thinking. Later that month, I was sitting in bed at my grandmother’s house, heart racing, chest tight, feeling like silence might swallow me whole. I dialed the three numbers.

On the other end was a calm voice. Someone who didn’t rush or judge me. We talked through coping strategies, and by the end of the call, I wasn’t magically healed, but the fog had lifted just enough for me to keep going. In that moment, that was all I could ask for.

I saw a poster in my doctor’s office: “988 – National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.” Later that month, I was sitting in bed at my grandmother’s house, heart racing, chest tight, feeling like silence might swallow me whole. I dialed the three numbers.

That night taught me the power of a small, timely gesture. In behavioral science, they call it a nudge: a simple change in how choices are presented that makes a better outcome more likely. Think about putting vegetables at eye level in a grocery store instead of banning junk food. The choice remains, but the path to the healthier option becomes clearer. For someone in crisis, seeing three digits on their student ID card could work the same way. The difference between knowing or not knowing about 988 could be the difference between spiraling and picking up the phone.

The 988 National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is a 24/7/365, publicly-funded resource that has been shown to save lives. The problem is awareness. According to a 2024 poll by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, fewer than one in four Americans are even “somewhat familiar” with 988. That means millions of people could be reaching for help without knowing the resource exists.

Students are particularly vulnerable. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people ages 15-24. And college counseling centers are overwhelmed with wait times that stretch for several weeks. In moments of acute crisis, students cannot afford to wait until their next appointment or go searching through Google for resources. They need support in the moment.

That’s why printing 988 on student ID cards matters. Contact with 988 is on the rise. In just a year, calls to the lifeline rose by 48 percent and texts by 1445 percent, a clear sign that, as the visibility and accessibility of the number increase, so does its use. Printing 988 on an ID card, an item students carry everywhere, means they don’t have to remember a poster or navigate a website in a moment of panic. The number is right there.

What makes this initiative so powerful is how little it costs. Universities already reprint IDs regularly. Adding three digits is a minor design tweak. Schools spend thousands on wellness campaigns and programming; yet this simple step might reach more students than all of those efforts combined.

Some states are already leading the way. New York and Virginia, for example, have passed laws requiring schools to include 988 on student ID cards. That progress is encouraging, but a patchwork approach isn’t enough. Mental health crises don’t stop at state borders, and neither should access to lifesaving numbers.

That’s why national advocacy is critical. As a council member for the Coalition for Student Wellbeing (C4SW), I have seen firsthand how powerful coordinated action can be. C4SW’s mission is simple: bridge the gap between students and decision-makers through advocacy, collaboration, and education. Printing 988 on IDs is exactly the kind of systemic fix we aim to achieve. That is why the coalition has launched a national advocacy campaign to add 988 to student ID cards.

I am still here today, not because I am stronger than anyone else, but because in a moment of silence, help was within reach.

Universities can make this change now. Legislators can make it standard nationwide. This is not about saving every life; no single policy can do that. It is about ensuring that every student has a fighting chance to reach for help when they need it most.

SAMHSA Grant Reversal Fuels Additional Anxiety in the Field

Posted on January 16, 2026January 20, 2026 by Mollie Ames

On Wednesday morning, Scott Delaney woke up to an email from an address he didn’t recognize. In a hasty 6 a.m. message, the writer explained to have been hearing from contacts at community-based organizations running substance use disorder and harm reduction programs that “their grants were all cancelled.” The stranger wondered: Had Delaney, who leads Grant Witness, an online database tracking federal grant terminations, heard the same?

In fact Delaney hadn’t — yet. By 10 a.m., NPR broke the story that, the previous night, the Trump administration had notified hundreds that their funding from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) had been terminated, apparently due to misalignment with “agency priorities.” Upwards of 2,100 grants were cancelled, worth a total around $2 billion. Delaney’s Signal threads blew up. Emails and web form submissions reporting specific grant terminations and requesting information flowed in. The Grant Witness team spent the day building a new system to track SAMHSA grants. Come evening, Delaney had put his kids to bed and was settling back down at the computer when he learned the Trump administration had reversed its decision: The cancelled grants are now restored.

In that moment, following the news of reinstatement, silence fell upon the Grant Witness Slack chat. Delaney described a sense of relief, perhaps second only to disbelief: a stomach-clench of mixed emotions no doubt reflecting the experience of mental health professionals across the country. They had spent hours mobilizing, scrambling for answers, only to end up with a new set of questions, among them: Is it over?

This latest instance of federal policy whiplash plays into a larger pattern that makes it difficult for some to completely shake off concerns.

Certain developments on this front have been reassuring. That lawmakers from across the political aisle activated to restore the funding indicates vast support for these programs, which widely focus on suicide prevention and substance use treatment, including for young people. The letter SAMHSA sent rescinding the terminations also seems to promise a quick return to regular programming. “Your award will remain active under its original terms and conditions,” a copy of the email obtained by LearningWell states. “Please disregard the prior termination notice and continue program activities as outlined in your award agreement.”

But this latest instance of federal policy whiplash plays into a larger pattern that makes it difficult for some to completely shake off concerns. This fall, LearningWell covered the ongoing uncertainty that has weighed on mental health researchers over the fate of federally funded projects. Throughout 2025, mass grant freezes and terminations by the National Health Institute, for example, disrupted scientific research across a range of disciplines. In the case of mental health, the particularly unfunny irony is of course that the stress of these cuts has been damaging to the mental health — and careers and livelihoods — of the researchers themselves.

“It’s really hard to know and trust, frankly, the information and know how it’s going to play out,” said Sara Abelson, the senior director of training and education at The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs at Temple University. At the junction of mental health and higher education, the ground beneath her has felt shaky for a while now. Amid this week’s cuts, Abelson paid special attention to one grant impacted that provides funds to colleges and universities: the Garrett Lee Smith Campus Suicide Prevention program. According to research Abelson has been conducting on federal grants for student basic needs, between 2016 and 2024, G.L.S. touched nearly 250 campuses in 45 states and Puerto Rico. These are the kind of wide-reaching “lifesaving supports” she said have been threatened. Will next time be for real?

Delaney also isn’t quite ready to unwind. Well-versed in the grant cancellation and restoration process, he worries about how long it will take this round. On Wednesday, some grantees shared with him documents, called Notices of Award, they received reestablishing their funding to zero. These NOAs are legal contracts, with the terms offset, in Delaney’s experience, only when a new one is issued. So, he wonders, are the grantees technically owed their original funds at this point? Will some end up pausing their work out of caution? SAMHSA did not respond immediately to a request for comment as to whether revised NOAs will be sent or the expected timeline.

Others worry, because the potential reasons for the original cancellations remain, future cuts may still be coming. Kathleen Ethier, the former director of the division of adolescent and school health at the Centers for Disease Control, believes U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s expressed views on the over-discussion and over-pathologization of youth mental health issues don’t bode well for the future of related initiatives. “I do think that there is an ideological reason why these grants were targeted,” she said, “and I do think we have to remain vigilant about the ways in which this administration is going to support young people’s mental health in schools.”

The continuous federal funding upheaval may have had at least one positive outcome for mental health advocates, though. Now they know how to respond. While Delaney said the initial rush following this week’s terminations — to organize his team and collect new information and field inquiries all at once — felt akin to Whac-A-Mol, previous experience helped him maintain a sense of control. “I think because we’ve done this before, honestly, I felt ready to tackle this,” he said. “We knew what to do, we knew who to contact, and we were going to be able to put together a database that was going to be really helpful, and we were going to be able to do it really well, really fast.”

“It’s really, really energizing to see the vast numbers of folks pull together, the communities activate and mobilize, and you can draw a lot of strength from that,” Delaney said.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Student Mental Health Advocates Want 988 Lifeline on all College IDs

Posted on January 13, 2026January 13, 2026 by Mollie Ames

Two years ago, a common interest in mental health advocacy landed two young college students from different ends of the country in the same virtual room. They didn’t know it yet, but their meeting would launch not just a friendship but a working partnership with national implications.

Carson Domey, then a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, and Shriya Garg, in her first year at the University of Georgia, started swapping strategies, sharing the trials and errors of their mental health advocacy work. Domey told Garg about his efforts as a teenager in Massachusetts to get schools to print the suicide prevention hotline on the back of student ID cards. Garg, intrigued, ran with the idea and found success with it on her own college campus.

Today, Domey and Garg are the leaders of the Coalition for Student Wellbeing, a nonprofit Domey founded in 2024 to unite college students across the country who want to affect mental health change at their institutions. The coalition’s first major campaign is to promote the inclusion of the now three-digit 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline on student IDs at as many colleges and universities as possible.

Both Domey and Garg see the initiative as a relatively simple way to achieve critical, even life-saving, results. As Garg put it, “it’s just a small change that has a big, big impact.”

18 to 25-year-olds report to suffer from mental illness more than any other adult demographic; yet they may be lacking a critical awareness of the resources that can help as well as the instinct to seek them out.

In July 2022, 988 replaced a 10-digit number as the national hotline to call or text for support during a mental health or substance abuse-related crisis. But according to a 2023 study, nearly 57 percent of 1,345 college students surveyed didn’t know the 988 Lifeline existed; 20 percent said if they were in a crisis, they would not contact any services at all.

A more recent poll found up to 82 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds had at least heard of 988, although only 28 percent of all respondents of any age indicated they were somewhat or very familiar with the service.

Adding 988 to college IDs places the tool literally in the palm of students’ hands. “You can’t get anywhere without a student ID,” Garg said of the card’s constant companionship. “It’s like your identity as a college student. You memorize your number — that’s how you take your tests, that’s how you get into all the buildings, that’s how you get into your dorm, that’s how you get into your dining halls.”

Perhaps even more than a resource, IDs that include 988 deliver a message to students: that their school and administration care about campus wellbeing and want to offer support. “It’s nice to know from the get-go that there’s someone or there’s something there for you,” Garg said. That comfort, she added, is not only for young people but also their parents, eager for assurances their student will be okay on his own.

“It’s nice to know from the get-go that there’s someone or there’s something there for you.”

The coalition’s campaign is not so much a new idea as it is a nudge towards one that has not yet reached its promise. Legislation in 25 states already mandates the inclusion of 988 on student IDs. To reach colleges and universities in the remaining 35, Domey and Garg have mapped a plan of attack, featuring their preferred three-pronged approach: education, advocacy, and collaboration, specifically across the student-administrator divide.

So far, the coalition has partnered with the youth mental health nonprofit Active Minds to produce a toolkit for students interested in starting the campaign on their own campuses. They then followed up the release of the toolkit with a webinar to share additional information and field questions from students.

2026 is ushering in a new chapter of advocacy as the coalition launches an outreach campaign targeting the student governments at the five most populated colleges and universities in states where 988 is not yet required. The goal is to inspire existing student leaders to take up the initiative on their own campuses.

A particular benefit of the 988 appeal, especially as a starting point for the coalition, is that it requires a fairly low lift from the administrative point of view. Garg even called the effort “low hanging fruit.”

“We’re not asking the school to come up with a new resource. 988 is free; it’s federally funded; it’s there,” Domey said. “We have a very strong case for why this should cost zero dollars and zero cents for schools.”

Keeping the Connection

The coalition’s leaders are hopeful that developing a broad network of student changemakers will pave the way for their future projects. “I think there’s going to be so many long-lasting relationships with different campuses across the country that will be created from this initiative,” Domey said. “It really shows the value that we hope to demonstrate in terms of being a resource to student leaders.”

As Domey and Garg well know, student mental health advocates need each other’s support; their battles are never easily won. Before Garg turned her attention to the 988 work, she was championing the implementation of student mental health screenings in universities. Though the cause itself is still alive, Garg’s progress stalled in the face of certain barriers, like privacy and liability concerns, too big to climb.

Domey is particularly familiar with the fits and starts of bureaucratic policy change, especially in large institutions where the coalition stands to have the deepest impact. “Even though we can have some of the most supportive administrators, faculty, and staff and students behind this,” he said, “things are still sometimes going to take time.”

One asset in the coalition’s corner is the prominent advisory board of higher education leaders Domey has nurtured and engaged. Members include presidents Mark Gearan of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Domenico Grasso of the University of Michigan.

Kent Willis, another advisor, is the senior vice president for enrollment and student engagement at Stephen F. Austin State University. He said he’s been involved in the 988 campaign primarily to offer guidance on navigating diverse university systems and introduce Domey to personal connections on various campuses.

“Yes, all colleges and universities share some similarities, but the governance structure can be very different,” Willis said. He’s been counseling Domey, asking: “How is it that you create that common collaborative conversation for the initiative to get as far as it can in order to make the ultimate impact that we all hope that it would make?”

While ready to leverage his expertise and connection for the cause, Willis also stressed the importance that the messaging continues to come from students themselves. “It adds that other level of validity to the work,” he said, “because the student voice is extremely important and student leaders hold a significant role as a stakeholder group.”

Even if school leadership doesn’t ultimately institute the change to student IDs, Willis said the coalition’s campaign could be successful just by having reached the right ears in the right rooms. “It allows or invites a conversation that maybe hadn’t been happening in the highest level decision-making conversations.”

For Domey, the ultimate driving force of the campaign continues to be the number of students it stands to help. In the master spreadsheet he created — with the hundreds of student government contacts the coalition hopes to reach — he also included a column for the total enrollment at each school.

“As we hopefully start to see the spreadsheet light up green with schools that have changed,” Domey said, “we can tangibly see how many students we’re impacting.”

You can reach the Coalition for Student Wellbeing at advocacy@c4sw.org for more information about the 988 campaign.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Colors and Connections

Posted on January 6, 2026January 6, 2026 by Mollie Ames

Xochitl Casillas’ students were moping again. As the dean of Chicano Latino student affairs at the Claremont Colleges, she had come to expect this phenomenon: When February rolled around, and Valentine’s Day became imminent, those without partners seemed to feel their singledom more keenly than ever. She called them, affectionately, the “lonely hearts club.” She also wanted to help.

Starting last year, Casillas organized an event on Valentine’s Day-eve for students who didn’t want to be alone to come together. The main activity was an art workshop, called Campus Colors and Connection, which asks students to consider the feelings different colors provoke and then create abstract drawings to represent those feelings or related experiences. By sharing their work and thinking with each other, they could learn more about their peers, as well as themselves.

“This is the time where a lot of people who want partnership may not have it,” Casillas remembered telling the group. “But today, this is an opportunity to connect.”

The workshop Casillas led her students through was developed by The Foundation for Art and Healing, a nonprofit that promotes the arts as an intervention for loneliness. Jeremy Nobel, M.D., Ph.D., a physician and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, started the foundation to explore the impact of the arts on health generally but pivoted towards developing arts-based resources for loneliness about a decade ago. At that point, loneliness was emerging as a predominant mental health concern, and research had begun to suggest what Nobel already suspected: The arts could help.

Today, with loneliness widely considered a national crisis and young adults particularly affected, Nobel continues to believe in art as an antidote. Lately, he and his team have made a special push to bring their work to colleges and universities. Educators, like Casillas, all too familiar with their students’ struggles, have become eager partners. Even those who might question handing crayons to twenty-somethings are considering: Can they afford not to try?

“I think loneliness is where depression was 20 years ago,” Nobel said, “where people didn’t even want to say it out loud.” In other words, Americans may have come around to the idea that depression is a medical condition, rather than a personal defect, but they don’t necessarily treat loneliness with the same open mind. Nobel, whose background is in internal medicine, likes to say loneliness is just a biological signal that a person needs to connect, like feeling thirsty is a signal to drink water. He urges others to adopt this same understanding, or risk the consequences.

Evidence shows that, physically, loneliness can make people vulnerable to inflammation, higher blood pressure, and a weaker immune system. Mentally, they may act less rationally and more impulsively; they may begin to see the world as threatening. And the lonelier they stay, the more threatening the world seems and the more difficult it becomes to develop connections in the future. Nobel calls this “spiraling.”

Young people report to be the loneliest of any age group, despite seeming so well-connected online. Even considering the end of the pandemic and return to in-person learning, Gen Z continues to indicate widespread loneliness; in 2024, up to eight in 10 were saying they had been lonely in the last year. As for why, a slew of familiar explanations abounds, like the impact of social media, drawing youth away from “real” human interaction.

Art and Healing

For Nobel, the connection between loneliness and the arts wasn’t immediately apparent. At first, his interest in the health impacts of creative expression was focused on how it might help treat acute trauma. He had personally sensed the benefits after using poetry to make sense of his feelings about the Sept. 11 attacks. A psychologist overseeing a similar brand of work in a more formal setting confirmed patients were finding relief, specifically across race and class backgrounds.

“The arts seemed to be helpful across all these wide horizons,” Nobel said, “which meant something was going on that really rewired your brain in some important ways.”

In 2003, Nobel launched The Foundation for Art and Healing, eager to explore the effects himself. He kept the focus on trauma-affected groups — first those with military backgrounds, then those dealing with sexual, domestic, meteorologic, and other forms of trauma. As the scope expanded, Nobel heard a common refrain: The programs “made them less lonely and more connected.”

Brain imaging now shows how areas associated with social connection light up while subjects engage with art.

Science was catching up, too. Brain imaging now shows how areas associated with social connection light up while subjects engage with art. Other findings suggest it can reduce hormones associated with stress and increase “feel-good” ones, like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin.

As evidence mounted, the foundation turned its attention fully to art’s possible sway over loneliness. In its current form, the organization aims to raise awareness and reduce stigma around loneliness, as well as disseminate research-based programs that help people connect. Offerings include original films, online exercises, and in-person workshops, all within the organization’s signature initiative, Project UnLonely.

Core to all this work, and meant to maximize its impact, is the foundation’s public health approach. The Foundation for Art and Healing team partners with other businesses and organizations to implement its services, rather than delivering them directly. It also prioritizes simple and low-cost interventions that don’t require prior medical or professional training to implement. “The key is to do things that meet three criteria: effectiveness, scalability, and sustainability,” Nobel said.

While the foundation also targets the general public, the elderly, and workers in high-stress environments, Gen Z has become a particular focus. Community-based organizations like museums and libraries can be good partners for reaching the 18 to 28-year-old demo. But, Nobel said, “by far the most direct way is through colleges and universities.”

So far, the foundation has reached more than 50 campuses and 6,000 students. The institutions range from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health to large public research universities in the south and small community colleges on the west coast. The activities appeal to a range of campus community members, including those in student affairs, residential life, spiritual life, athletics, and even campus museums.

At the Claremont Colleges, students used the Campus Colors and Connection exercise to explore their common cultural identity. When Casillas asked them to represent, through different colors and shapes, what brings them joy, for example, she said her Latino students depicted cooking with a grandparent in the Dominican Republic, swinging in a hammock in Puerto Rico, and speaking Spanish. She watched them become eager to tell their stories and encourage new friends to do the same.

“People are like, ‘Oh, it feels like we’re back in elementary school. We’re just coloring,’” Casillas said. “But I think they didn’t realize how vulnerable they were going to get.” After the 45-minute Valentine’s Day session ended, students lingered to continue the conversation.

The simplicity, perhaps child-like nature, of the exercise might push some away. But Nobel said the playfulness is the point. It’s also part of the draw as a less intimidating, or clinical, form of self-care. “We never frame it as therapy,” he said of the workshops. “We often don’t even use the word loneliness in our promotion of it.” Instead, the directive is simple: “Create and connect.”

Expanding Connections

The University of New England was an early adopter of Campus Colors and Connection, starting about four years ago. Coming out of the pandemic, Dean of Students Jennifer DeBurro said she and her team decided to take a “10,000-foot view” of the student wellbeing issue: “We were asking ourselves questions about on-ramps: What are some of the additional ways that we could provide opportunities for students to connect with peers in a low-risk, easy way?” That’s when they were introduced to Nobel’s work.

First a one-off program, Campus Colors and Connection is now part of U.N.E.’s orientation program. “They can just talk — talk about what’s making them nervous about going off to school, talk about what’s exciting, reflect on a memory,” DeBurro said of incoming students.

When it comes to evaluating the workshop, the primary mechanism is the survey students fill out after participating. Questions prompt them to reflect generally on the experience, and so far, the results are positive. The vast majority have reported they would recommend the workshop to others (96 percent), as well as feeling more in touch with their emotions (84 percent) and more connected to their peers (84 percent). 79 percent of those who indicated feeling lonely beforehand said they felt less lonely afterwards.

Yet Nobel recognizes the survey work isn’t as robust as it could be. He hopes to expand assessment to consider the potential impact on student success, including academic performance and retention. “Does being more connected increase learning? All the evidence says it should,” he said.

As the foundation aims to strengthen assessment efforts, Claremont and U.N.E. continue to extend their partnerships with the foundation. Casillas has now led Campus Colors and Connection not only for her Latino students broadly but with a group of student mentors, who learned to run a version of the session themselves. She also brought the workshop to fellow staff.

U.N.E. recently began offering a tailored version of the Campus Colors and Connection for first-gen students. “We continue to talk about it in as many different corners of the university as we can,” DeBurro said, “so that any opportunity we have to bring it to a new population, we do.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

10 Years of Building a Community of Action for Youth Mental Health

Posted on December 16, 2025January 21, 2026 by Mollie Ames

When The Steve Fund began in 2014, youth mental health was just beginning to break into the national conversation. But the nuanced needs of young people from underserved and under-resourced communities and first-generation college students were largely invisible in both research and practice.

The numbers tell part of the story: over one million students impacted through our programs, five million people reached through our Family Corner digital platform, and 66 colleges engaged in our Excellence in Mental Health on Campus Initiative. But behind every statistic is a young person who found support, a family that learned to recognize warning signs, a campus that transformed its approach to student wellbeing.

Our signature initiatives have reshaped how institutions think about mental health support. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve always kept youth voices at the center. The Steve Fund’s Excellence in Mental Health Initiative provides evidence-based strategies for creating inclusive campus environments. Our Young, Gifted & Resilient conferences bring multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross-sectoral stakeholders together at universities across the nation, each event co-created with the host institution to address its unique challenges. My Digital Sanctuary, our newest digital platform, takes a fresh approach by speaking to concepts like love, hope, and creativity — shifting away from traditional medical models to more inclusive, spiritual, cultural, and artistic approaches that resonate with young people.

But we face a critical moment. Schools, families, nonprofits, and communities are facing significant reductions in resources at a time of sustained high need. Important systems that young people have long counted on are being dismantled. Intense pressures are being placed upon our nation’s most resource-limited youth and families that may have to suffer in silence due to unmet need and lack of access to mental health care and resources.

“There’s a real risk that young people may feel hopeless, uncertain, and fearful about the direction in which the country is going — anxious about violence, climate change, and civil rights rollbacks.”

There’s a real risk that young people may feel hopeless, uncertain, and fearful about the direction in which the country is going — anxious about violence, climate change, and civil rights rollbacks. That’s precisely why our work on risk and protective factors matters so much right now. We’re equipping youth and communities with resilience strategies and helping them learn to cope with stress, build supportive relationships, identify mental health services, and access restorative resources like nature, creativity, and rest.

The Steve Fund operates in a space where research meets practice, leading to direct impact and measurable outcomes. Our groundbreaking partnerships with the United Negro College Fund to assess mental health at H.B.C.U.s, our work with the Child Mind Institute on family mental health barriers, and our national student surveys inform every program we design. We ensure that our interventions are both culturally responsive and truly effective.

As we look toward the next decade, we’re scaling bold solutions that are youth-guided, family-centered, and grounded in rigorous research. We’re leveraging technology and embracing A.I., not as a replacement for human connection but as a tool to expand access and personalization for communities often overlooked in mental health practice.

The work of The Steve Fund matters now more than ever. When we support young people’s mental health and emotional wellbeing, we’re building the kind of future we want to live in.

What began in a dining room as a family’s response to loss has grown into a national movement and a community of action. The Steve Fund’s first decade laid a compelling foundation built on research, collaboration, and a belief in the promise of every student. As we enter our second decade, we remain steadfast in our mission: to ensure that all young people have the support they need to thrive.

Because no young person should face their struggles alone. And every family deserves to know that help is available.

Dr. Annelle Primm is senior medical director of The Steve Fund, a leading nonprofit dedicated to promoting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people from underserved and under-resourced communities.

Princeton Review Releases Latest Findings on Campus Mental Health Services

Posted on November 25, 2025November 25, 2025 by Mollie Ames

Gone are the days when state-of-the-art dining and fitness facilities alone could sweep prospective college students off their feet. When it comes to campus life, Gen Z has a new priority: mental health care.

The Princeton Review is taking note. For the last two years, the company best known for its college admissions services, including test preparation books and tutoring, has been evaluating schools based on support for student wellbeing.

On Wednesday, The Review, in partnership with the Ruderman Family Foundation, published the results of its second Campus Mental Health Survey, along with a Mental Health Services Honor Roll, which highlights colleges and universities with model commitment to student mental health and wellbeing.

This year’s survey found broad gains in mental health services compared to last year, indicating a shift towards more comprehensive, preventative models of care. The 2026 Honor Roll also lists 30 institutions, up from the previous 16.

“I’m really pleased with the results of the survey,” said Mark Reed, the director of the health service at Dartmouth College, a new addition to the Honor Roll. “It reflects the investment that people are making nationally to support the mental health and wellness of our college students.”

Between fall 2024 and spring 2025, two separately polled groups participated in the survey: administrators who reported on the state of mental health policies and programs on their campuses, and students who reported on their sense of the availability of services and awareness of how and where to find them.

The administrators represented 540 different colleges and universities, more than twice as many as in the 2024 survey. Their responses reveal growth since the previous year in the portion of schools with a variety of mental health services.

This year’s survey found broad gains in mental health services compared to last year, indicating a shift towards more comprehensive, preventative models of care.

The percentage of schools with return-from-leave support programs increased by 18 points, for example; and the percentage of those with counseling centers with accreditation or following accrediting guidelines increased by 15 points.

Other notable areas of growth include the incorporation of wellness in residential life (now at 93 percent of schools), the adoption of for-credit or non-credit wellness education (70 percent), and the existence of a website consolidating information about campus mental health offerings (96 percent).

More than 31,000 students also responded to questions about their perceptions of mental health programming on campus. The percentage of students who agreed mental health services are readily available on their campus went up by five points; the percentage that agreed their institutions prioritize student mental health went up by another five.

79 percent of students said they know where to access resources on campus, although that figure reflects only a one-point increase from last year.

Eric Wood, the director of counseling and mental health at Texas Christian University, another school named to the Honor Roll this year, believes the growing investment in mental health services reflects an understanding that these concerns impact not only where students choose to go to school but whether they persist to graduation.

“Protecting student retention is also one of the hallmarks of college mental health, so these findings are consistent with the notion that one way to address enrollment concerns is to invest in campus mental health services,” Wood wrote in an email.

At Dartmouth, Mark Reed said the broad implications for student success are one reason the president, Sian Beilock, has made campus wellbeing her “number one priority.”

“She’s made that sort of a key component to the academic success of Dartmouth — that if we don’t have the health and wellness of our community, then we really can’t be at our best,” Reed said.

The Honor Roll schools, like Dartmouth and T.C.U., stood apart for their compliance with three main criteria: an administration that supports mental health through policies and programs; students who enjoy a quality of life that is healthy and “attentive to wellbeing;” and initiatives that empower students to address their own mental health (e.g. peer-to-peer offerings).

College ranking systems — most famously that of U.S. News & World Report — have been subject to controversy in recent years due to suspicions that narrow guidelines can end up neglecting otherwise quality schools deserving of recognition.

Wood views the Honor Roll as breaking the mold. He wrote it was “refreshing to see information based on details provided by schools as opposed to arbitrary national rankings that position schools against each other and don’t provide information about the survey samples.”

Wood hopes that schools — both named to the Honor Roll and not — will use the resource to connect and collaborate.

“College mental health is not a competitive world, and counseling center directors often share and borrow programs and ideas,” he wrote.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

New Thinking in College Student Mental Health

Posted on November 11, 2025January 21, 2026 by Mollie Ames

Alexis Redding has a clear perspective on the well-publicized struggles of today’s college students: The crisis narrative is not helping to solve the problem. Talking about the “crisis,” she argues, sets us up to look for a quick fix. But the issues are systemic, and it is time to address what her research shows are the persistent challenges that students experience during a stressful time of life.

Redding is the co-author of “The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood,” which documents the emotional ups and downs of the college years based on a trove of lost interviews she uncovered that feature college students from the 1970s. In the tapes, she heard echoes of the experiences with loneliness, stress, and emotional angst that students talk about in her classroom today. This work and her teaching led her to question the stories we tell about student wellbeing in college.

This spring, Redding will release a new book “Mental Health in College: What the Research Tells Us About Supporting Students.” The developmental psychologist, author, and professor brings together experts in college mental health, including students, to offer a new path forward. Redding and her co-authors argue for a community approach to student wellbeing and offer a deeper examination of the causes — both universal and specific — that make the college years challenging for so many students.

Here is an excerpt from our recent interview.

LW: Who is the target audience for the book?

AR: The book is written for student affairs professionals and campus leaders — the people who are making decisions about supporting student mental health at an institutional level. But I think that everyone, including students, faculty, and parents, can benefit from reading it. Each chapter is layered with student stories that make the challenges they are experiencing both tangible and relatable. We hear, in their own words, about the experience of being in college. And, once we listen to what they are telling us, we are better equipped to create a support structure that genuinely helps them.

LW: There is an underlying theme in the book that challenges the reader to think about college student mental health differently. Can you explain that thinking?

AR: One of the core distinctions of this work is that it focuses on the wellbeing of all students —not only those in crisis.

Developmentally, the college years are inherently unsettling and disorienting. Students struggle for many reasons that go beyond clinical diagnoses. We need to decouple two intertwined realities: the typical developmental challenges that come with growing up and the clinical mental health concerns that require specialized care. Only then can we respond appropriately to each.

The crisis narrative, while well-intentioned, often fuels panic — for educators and for parents sending their children to college. Out of fear of under-reacting, we sometimes overreact, even when students describe expected challenges, like loneliness, anxiety, or uncertainty, as they navigate transition. By defining everything as crisis, we end up addressing only those who meet clinical thresholds and overlook the broader developmental picture.

When institutions lean too heavily into this framing, the default solution becomes: more counseling. Of course, clinical care is essential for students who need it. But not every student meets that benchmark or feels ready to seek therapy. Directing everyone to counseling by default overwhelms already strained systems and can even limit access for those in acute distress.

This book is meant to reframe that conversation — to move from crisis response to community care. Every student needs connection, purpose, and a sense of mattering. When we recognize that, we can begin to design campuses where all students can thrive.

LW: How does this perspective connect with what your research shows about the state of college mental health throughout the decades?

AR: What we know is that college students have always struggled. My archival research goes back to the 1940s and shows that students are struggling in many of the same ways that our students are struggling today. That’s not to say that we don’t have unique struggles in 2025. We don’t want to ignore the role of social media and the impact of the pandemic on youth development and what it means to grow up in the 21st century. Yet, the developmental challenges — how hard it is to grow and change and ask the big questions about who we are and what we want out of our lives — that is remarkably similar across generations. So, the challenge is to differentiate between what students have always struggled with and what is new in today’s experience.

My hope is that we can pivot to a conversation about what is typical about stress and anxiety and loneliness — things that we know have been persistent across generations — so that we can find a way to both build a campus community in which we can better support students and change the culture more broadly. That will help us reframe what it means to get support in college and make systemic change. And it will also help us more clearly identify what is new and what needs a more targeted solution.

“By defining everything as crisis, we end up addressing only those who meet clinical thresholds and overlook the broader developmental picture.”

LW: Where did the idea for the book come from?

AR: A couple of years ago, I was asked by our dean to create a professional development program on mental health in higher education as part of our Harvard Graduate School of Education professional development arm. Each year, we work with a cohort of practitioners that includes student affairs professionals, clinical mental health providers, members of the president’s cabinet, and faculty members. We have an exceptional faculty of 16 leading voices in the field, including Tony Jack (Boston University), Jesse Beal (University of Michigan), Dustin Liu (New York University), Adam Pierson Milano (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill), and a team from the JED Foundation.

The course looks at the entirety of the student journey, thinking about the different transition points that students experience, from admissions to career search. We work hard to break down the silos we all experience in higher education to think more meaningfully about how we can work together to support students. I love the experience of running this program and being able to build a robust community of practice. But it is a small group by design, so I started to think about how to get these really important ideas in front of a wider audience. That was the spark for this book.

LW: The book is organized into three parts with seven chapters, each written by a different author. Can you tell us more about this format?

AR: The first part of the book looks at the scope of the problem from two very different perspectives: the student’s and the institution’s.

Section one starts with Rainsford Stauffer (author of “All the Gold Stars” and “An Ordinary Age”), who is joined by three student authors, to give us a student perspective on navigating colleges and universities today. They share stories of struggling with mental health challenges, navigating the typical stress and anxiety around the experience of being a student, and their range of experiences in finding the right support.

Next, Dr. Laura Erikson Schroth, medical director of the JED Foundation, and Dr. Janis Whitlock, founder of Cornell’s Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery, bring us an institutional perspective of what is going on in our colleges and universities. Their clinical lens helps to underscore how we can meet the needs of students struggling with acute mental health crises, including suicidality and self-harm, as well as those navigating the more typical ups and downs of college.

Together, these two chapters frame the book with student voices and national data on the two types of challenges students are experiencing — developmental vs. clinical — and help us to understand both the depth and breadth of the challenges.

Part two focuses on how to build holistic supports for students who are more likely to struggle during the college experience: students who are under financial strain, community college students juggling school with other responsibilities, and military-affiliated students. The idea in part two is to deeply understand some of the challenges that those three groups of students are facing. This helps us to develop and design supports on campus that not only are targeted at helping those particular groups but benefit all students more broadly.

For example, the chapter on community college students, written by Amanda O. Latz of Ball State University, is focused specifically on what faculty members can do and how they can be part of this conversation about transforming our institutions. She shares actionable takeaways that are beneficial to faculty across institutional types. There are suggestions for using your syllabus to name and normalize struggles, encourage proactive help-seeking on campus, and to make sure we meet students where they are. She also asks important questions about how we can structure our classrooms and our assignments to recognize the realities of students’ experiences and to balance rigor with compassion.

LW: Part three focuses on transitions but not just the obvious ones. Can you tell us about that?

AR: We tend to put boundaries on the college experience. We talk as if the experience starts the day that students arrive and it ends the day they cross the stage. But that framing ignores the stresses they arrive with and the anxiety most people feel when thinking about what comes next. We’re trying to broaden the narrative of the student journey and to recognize that those experiences that bookend college also inform what happens during the undergraduate years.

To think about admissions stress, we have Angél Perez, the C.E.O. of the National Association of College Admission Counseling (Nacac), and his colleague Melissa Clinedinst, Nacac’s director of Research Initiatives and Partnerships. They conducted research on the stress students experience in the admissions process and advocate for a more humane and holistic approach that considers student wellbeing. They offer actionable insights into how we can rethink the messages students receive and how we can better scaffold this transition.

To consider the transition from college to career, we have a chapter that focuses on the lessons of Stanford’s Life Design curriculum by Dustin Liu (N.Y.U. Stern School of Business) and Joseph Catrino (Dartmouth College). They help us see that we all have a responsibility to help students consider what comes next. Inside the classroom, we really need to be thinking about building the kinds of conversations, the kind of supports, the kinds of mentoring relationships that help prepare students for their careers. We are preparing our students for life, and it is important to lean into what it means for them to be prepared in that transition to the workforce and to be able to thrive there as well.

LW: In the community college section, I’m assuming there will be an examination of different student profiles, including students with marginalized identities or first-generation backgrounds.

AR: Absolutely. Considering student identities and experiences is central to every chapter of the book. We did not want to silo any individual identity in a stand-alone chapter. Instead, we wanted a nuanced look at the lived experiences of a range of students to be embedded in each. This approach recognizes the reality that students hold many different identities at once. Each author in the book has been tasked with thinking across the realities of who our students are to capture the nuances of their lived experiences. And they’ve done that in a powerful way.

LW: I was pleased to see you had a section on financial stress. Why did you think that was important to include?

AR: I’m excited about this chapter as well because we don’t talk enough about the impact on financial stress on student mental health and wellbeing. The authors, Bryan Ashton and Allyson Cornett, come to us from the Trellis Foundation in Texas. They really look at the complexity and nuance of what students are juggling while attending college, including student parents, by conducting large-scale research studies. Their chapter helps us to recognize the complexity of the student experience and to think meaningfully about designing a college community and robust support system that meets their needs.

LW: Do you think faculty are opening up to the idea that they have a role here?

AR: Yes, I do. We each have a part to play in building the kind of campus where all students feel supported. This includes faculty, staff and administrators, campus leaders, and other students as well. I like to draw on the research of Laura Rendón and the Ecological Model of Validation about the power of each individual interaction that you have on a college campus. Faculty are key in creating the kind of community where students feel seen and heard. But these moments of validation can also come from staff in the library, the dining hall, and facilities and maintenance. We need to think of every single member of the institution as part of the solution of creating the kind of caring environment where all students feel seen, heard, and valued.

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

Leading the Next Chapter of College Mental Health

Posted on November 4, 2025January 21, 2026 by Mollie Ames

When Eric Wood talks about the future of college mental health, he does so from the front lines. The longtime director of Texas Christian University’s Counseling and Mental Health Center and past president of the Texas University and College Counseling Directors Association has just been elected the next president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (A.U.C.C.C.D.). His tenure will begin in October 2026.

Known for his innovative Comprehensive Collaborative Care Model and award-winning e-book, “A New Narrative for College Mental Health,” Wood is stepping in to lead the nation’s largest organization for campus counseling leaders at a moment when the field, like all of higher ed, is confronting change. We caught up with him fresh off hosting a national symposium on performing artists and athletes and took the opportunity to ask him about A.U.C.C.C.D.’s plans and priorities.

LW: Congratulations on your election as president-elect of A.U.C.C.C.D. What do you see as the major challenges for the organization in the coming year?

EW: We as counseling centers have done a really good job capturing the narrative of how important college mental health is. College mental health has a lot more significance than people realize. If you think about the demographic we serve, the traditional 18- to 25-year-olds, that’s a prime demographic for pretty much anything — substance use, suicide, emerging disorders. It’s also the best time to treat them because if you can treat them then, they may have fewer episodes later, or none at all. Whereas if they wait 10 or 15 years, it’s a lot more ingrained and harder to treat.

Colleges and universities have greater access to that demographic than any other health-care system. They live, walk by, and travel by our campuses every day. So the question is: What opportunities does that create if government and other organizations really recognize this?

LW: You’ve become known for T.C.U.’s innovative model of collaborative care. Can you explain what that is and how it ties into your national leadership goals?

EW: We call it the Comprehensive Collaborative Care Model, and it’s reshaping how universities think about their role in mental health. We started it during the pandemic. The mindset had always been that college counseling centers were designed for developmental concerns — the stress that comes from change — not necessarily for students with high mental health needs. But those dynamics have shifted. Now we have students with much higher needs, and our systems weren’t designed for that.

So instead of building hospital-style treatment centers, we built bridges. We partner with community providers who were designed to work with individuals with high needs but who lack the infrastructure and access we have. They come onto our campus, use their programs, and our students stay in school, on our campus, in programs with other college students. It’s a win-win-win: The student’s insurance covers most costs so there’s just the co-pay, and we’ve gotten grants and donors so the treatment centers have the chance for little or no overhead. We’ve trained over 100 schools to replicate various parts of the model.

LW: You mentioned that politics and policy changes are affecting mental health care on campuses. What are you seeing?

EW: If you’re in a university that’s depending on federal funding, there’s a new level of raised exposure. There’s a perception that if a state or federal funding source doesn’t like something at your institution, they’re going to cut your funding off. People don’t realize that even if it had nothing to do with college counseling centers, it is going to trickle down if schools have that cut in funding. When universities face federal or state funding cuts, that trickles down to us. A 20 percent budget cut across campus means a 20 percent cut for the counseling center, too. And yet the demand for services has never been higher.

A lot of the culture-war legislation, like D.E.I. bans, has had unintended consequences. Some states have medical exemptions for those laws, but others don’t. We’ve seen schools cut services that were never meant to be targeted, like gender specific groups with mental health and addiction issues. This is an age group much more likely to seek help on campus than they would after graduation, so when you remove those options, you lose opportunities to intervene early.

“When policymakers pass laws or set funding priorities, I hope they think carefully about how that affects college mental health.”

We’re trying to make lawmakers aware that mental health has never been a partisan issue. Surveys show eight out of ten Americans believe schools are responsible for providing health care to students. The narrative we’re pushing is: “Look at the possibilities higher education offers society. Why would you want to limit that potential?”

LW: What other issues are most pressing for college counseling centers right now?

EW: We’re still seeing the ripple effects of the pandemic. And we do know that in this age group one of the things that spiked is their likelihood to transfer. The students entering college now were in middle school during the shutdowns — the classes of 2028 through 2030. That’s a critical cohort with a lot of struggles. They missed key developmental years, and those formative years had a lot of disruption going from middle school to high school, and we see that in their social and academic adjustment carrying over to higher education.

And as digital natives engaged in all the social platforms, they’re used to absorbing all the culture and content and polarizations in society. That’s their reference point, and a lot of them may not know what it’s like to not have that level of polarization. So they’re bringing that to campus. When they see politicians saying certain words or treating each other some way, you’re going to see that carry over to how they treat faculty. They see that people just break rules; you see that happening in politics and society, and that carries over into the res halls because that’s the frame of reference.

We’re also seeing a higher level of parental involvement. Their parents spent more time with them during lockdowns, engaged in a closer front-row seat to their education, so now we’re seeing that continue — sometimes helicopter-level involvement — in college life.

LW: What’s on your personal wish list as incoming president?

EW: To keep building that narrative and have a stronger voice nationally. We’ve had some success getting attention from politicians and national outlets, but there’s so much more to do. When policymakers pass laws or set funding priorities, I hope they think carefully about how that affects college mental health.

And college is where the developmental concerns play out because this is the prime age. The reason why colleges created counseling centers wasn’t because we thought every student had a clinical diagnosis. Most students do not. The centers exist because we define stress as heightened in times of major change, and a major one is when you start college. You only have about four or five of those moments in your life when everything can change. So starting college is one of them — you change where you eat, where you live, your identity, everything — and then graduating college is a second one. So you have so much change bookmarking the college experience. And then you do have associated stressors, like navigating the social environment, and we know that demographic tends to engage in high-risk behavior, so a lot of prevention work is important. That is why college counseling centers exist, and I contend colleges and universities are the best in the world at doing that. But because there’s currently a lot more students with high mental health needs coming to campus, the disconnect occurs that we aren’t good at what we’re doing. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

The mental health of young people is always going to be a popular, bipartisan cause. We just need to remind people of that and continue the collaboration.

LW: How do you see that collaboration playing out at the national level?

EW: Collaboration is essential. Some states have strong organizations, like Texas, but not all do. One of my goals is to help develop those networks. State laws affect us differently, so we need local collaboration as well as national unity. There’s strength in numbers, whether it’s state collectives, regional conferences, or collaborations across university systems, like the athletic conferences.

It’s also about mutual support. A lot of what’s in the headlines about higher education doesn’t directly involve counseling directors, but it still affects us through funding cuts, political pressures, or staffing shortages. Directors need to come together because having a collaborative amplifies our method, our messages. We need each other to stay resilient.

LW: You just hosted a symposium on athletes and performing arts. What can you tell us about the thinking behind spotlighting those populations?

EW: It really came out of conversations we were having on our campus about performing artists and athletes — two groups that represent the university in powerful ways but have very different kinds of support systems. Varsity athletes get a lot of institutional support, but there are just as many performers and non-varsity athletes who face similar pressures and injuries without the same safety nets.

For example, if a student athlete gets hurt, the university often covers the care, and they can still progress toward their degree. But if a dancer or musician gets injured, they often can’t progress toward their degree because performance is part of their coursework. That difference really highlights why universities need to think more broadly about how they support these students.

So we decided to organize a symposium to explore that. We reached out to experts from Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Harvard — literally the pioneers of performing arts medicine — and every single one of them said yes. We even had ballerina Tiler Peck as a keynote. It turned into a two-day virtual event that drew about 100 sign-ons per session; many of them were in classrooms watching together. It was the first time we’d done anything like it, and it really underscored how much synergy there is between athletic and performing-arts wellness.

LW: How long have you been at T.C.U., and what do you think your election says about A.U.C.C.C.D. and where it’s headed?

EW: I started at T.C.U. right out of my Ph.D. program in 2007 and became director in 2019, so I had one good semester before the pandemic hit. Everything we’ve built since then has been about adapting to change and meeting students where they are.

I’m honored by the role. I think part of the reason I was elected is because we’ve done a good job at innovation at T.C.U., and I think it shows a shift in the narrative about college mental health. For a long time, the assumption was that we as colleges were limited — that if a student had a serious mental health disorder, they needed to go elsewhere, just like you wouldn’t expect a university to perform surgery. But that’s changing. For example, one of our specialized programs is an intensive outpatient program on campus. I’d love to see every residential campus in America have one. The impact would be generational.

So, I think my election signals that people are starting to recognize the potential and the possibilities of what we can do — and that we can do it at a fraction of the cost, using programs that already exist. And why would you want to do anything to ruin that potential? To have my colleagues across the country say, “We want that kind of innovation leading us forward” — that’s deeply meaningful. It tells me people see the potential of college mental health, and they’re ready to invest in it.

Uncertainty Weighs on Mental Health Researchers

Posted on November 4, 2025November 4, 2025 by Mollie Ames

Last year, social psychologist Kathleen Ethier was going on 26 years at the Centers for Disease Control and feeling hopeful about the growing response to national mental health concerns, especially among America’s youth.

The Covid-19 pandemic had ushered in new urgency to understand why young people were struggling and find solutions, including ones schools and colleges might help implement.

“In the 35 years that I had spent in the field, I had never seen us all come together in that way,” said Ethier, who was the director of the C.D.C.’s division of adolescent and school health for eight years.

But that was another time and another administration. When Ethier left her post in January of her own volition to enter the private sector, her faith in the progress of her field was slipping. The conversations that had been fueling her optimism seemed to stop. “We were no longer talking about youth mental health,” she said.

Since the beginning of the year, widespread cuts to federal funding for scientific inquiry have been chipping away at the advancement of work on student mental health. Despite the issue’s record of bipartisan support, pertinent research and services have become casualties amid slashes to government agencies, programs, and grants

On college campuses, the fallout is multi-fold, threatening the wellbeing of not only students who struggle with their mental health but researchers and practitioners who now find their livelihoods at risk.

“All of these high points of funding were just taken away,” Ethier said of the shift under the second Trump administration. “Everyone on the other end of that — whether those are school systems or universities or researchers — are all suffering from the loss of those resources, which means the loss of viable alternatives for young people.”

This summer, a group of mostly Harvard University-affiliated researchers released their findings on the total cost of mental health- and substance abuse-related grants cancelled between February 28 and April 11: The estimated loss is more than $2 billion from 474 grants across the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

On college campuses, the fallout is multi-fold, threatening the wellbeing of not only students who struggle with their mental health but researchers and practitioners who now find their livelihoods at risk.

While some grants have been reinstated since the spring, others still hang in the balance. An online database, Grant Witness, continues to update a list of all grants cancelled by both the N.I.H. and N.S.F. As of November 3, the tracker marked around 140 grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, spanning less than $50,000 to more than $9 million, as “terminated.”

In an unfortunate but telling irony, Grant Witness co-founder Scott Delaney launched the database after being conditionally laid off from his work as a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where a federal funding freeze had affected his salary. The former lawyer turned climate scientist called Grant Witness a “tool to fight for these grants and to fight for American science.”

“We’re losing a huge competitive advantage in global research. We’re losing health benefits from research,” Delaney said of some of the concerns motivating his work. He also contributed to the report on mental health-related grant losses this spring.

Those N.I.M.H. grants that remain terminated had been supporting research on a range of populations and neurological and behavioral conditions. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, had a $3.8 million grant cancelled that was funding a longitudinal study following preschoolers into adolescence to determine early risk factors of psychopathology. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, another $3 million grant was cancelled that had been designated to help strengthen understandings of “Aging, Major Life Transitions, and Suicide Risk.”

Certain grants were terminated for backing projects deemed in conflict with the Trump administration’s orders against the promotion of ideas like “gender ideology” and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the mental health context, these cancellations could threaten developing understandings of unique factors and barriers affecting the wellbeing of racial, gender, and sexual minority groups. More than one lawsuit is now underway in an effort to reverse these types of cuts to research on “disfavored topics and populations.”

Another subset of grant losses has been the result of funding freezes on entire universities. Because these kinds of actions are targeting institutions, rather than particular research areas, mental health is one of countless disciplines implicated.

At Harvard Medical School, Professor Haiden Huskamp had been overseeing multiple training and research projects supported by the N.I.H. when the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion worth of federal funding for the Ivy League institution.

The freeze came in April after Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands from the Trump administration that the Cambridge university considered overreach and an attempt to curb academic freedom. (These same events led to the frozen salary of Scott Delaney from Grant Witness.)

For Huskamp, the fallout meant her research on the impact of telemedicine for the treatment of mental illness and opioid use disorder was put on hold. While Harvard launched a lawsuit to restore the funding, she grappled with the uncertainty of both her work and her team.

“You’re in the middle of a project, and you’re moving full steam ahead, but you basically just have to stop,” she said. “You worry that, depending on how long it goes, will you have to lay people off? Will you not be able to keep accessing data? Will you be able to pick it up easily?”

After around five months, Huskamp was able to reclaim her funding when a judge sided with Harvard and ruled the government’s funding freeze unconstitutional. But the damage of the delay was done.

Harvard’s researchers may not be completely out of the woods. President Trump has promised to appeal the judge’s recent ruling in favor of the university, while his administration already launched separate proceedings to bar Harvard from all business — grants included — with the government.

For other mental health researchers, the challenge is not having lost grants but rather trying to raise money for the first time in this new funding environment.

At Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, psychology professors Karin Coifman and John Gunstad are seeking support for what they hope will become one of the largest lifetime longitudinal studies ever on college student health, including mental health. For the aptly named Student Life Study, the researchers aim to recruit 10,000 students and collect health data from them throughout their lives.

With an initial $450,000 from their institution to get them started, Coifman and Gunstad knew they would need to raise the rest of their funds — the majority — from other sources. What they couldn’t have anticipated was a confusing standstill at the N.I.H. this winter, just when they started applying for federal grants.

In February, the N.I.H. temporarily stopped reviewing grant applications after the Trump administration blocked the agency from calling the necessary meetings. About 16,000 applications and $1.5 billion in funding hung in the balance as a result. At the same time, more than 1,000 employees at the N.I.H. had been laid off.

Given the upheaval, Coifman held off from reapplying for N.I.H. funding this spring. She only decided to reenter the fray in the fall after she served on a panel to review N.I.H. grant proposals and found things were once again proceeding smoothly.

Still, with the 2026 federal budget up in the air, the potential scarcity of available funds continues to stoke concern. President Trump proposed to slash the N.I.H. discretionary budget by a daunting 40 percent, or $18 billion, although his plans seem unlikely to pass given Congress’ push for funding at current levels or higher.

Preparing for all scenarios, Coifman said she will continue pursuing funding from every possible source: at the state level, as well as from private foundations and corporations. She understands other researchers, feeling a similar crunch, will be doing the same.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty and there’s a lot of vulnerability,” Coifman said. “Because we don’t really understand the processes and how they’re shifting.”

Eric Wood, the director of counseling and mental health at Texas Christian University, called the evolving state of federal funding at universities a “pendulum swing back and forth.”

“I think what most people would want is just stability — just to be able to predict what’s going on,” he said.

Wood is also sensitive to what he believes to be growing perception of higher education as generally unstable. This narrative, he worries, could prevent not only researchers but clinicians like himself from wanting to work at universities, if they think the job security is precarious.

“People wanted to work in higher education because you get so many different avenues, where you can explore different treatments; you have different populations of students,” Wood said. “But now I think people are saying, ‘Would I just have more freedom working in private practice?’”

“That obviously disadvantages our students if we can’t fill a position,” he added, referring to job openings for counseling staff.

According to Sara Abelson, an assistant professor at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, graduate students who once planned for careers in research are similarly reconsidering their paths. Lately, they’ve been expressing their skepticism about the availability of future opportunities.

“What can I do with my timing? How can I not come out as a new trained researcher in the current moment? Is it a safe and stable field to go into?” Abelson said students have been asking her.

So while Abelson has personally avoided funding cuts to her work, she maintains a front row seat to the fallout for not only colleagues but the wider mental health field. The message she said she and fellow staff are hearing is to “play it safe — pick something safe and do it perfectly.” She worries about how innovation in mental health work will suffer — about the capacity to make headway on behalf of all students going forward, and not just some.

“There’s no doubt that it is impacting the field,” she said of the funding upheaval.

“It’s impacting the mental health and wellbeing of those who are the focus of the grants and those leading the work, and it’s going to have lasting impacts.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

BentleyPlus

Posted on October 28, 2025October 28, 2025 by Mollie Ames

This September, The Wall Street Journal ranked Bentley University the 12th best college in America. Its criteria included considerations such as the institution’s impact on salary and how quickly the degree will pay for itself. While pleased with the bankable metrics, leaders at the Boston-based business university will tell you their real differentiator is fostering the personal formation of their students.

“We put a lot of emphasis on technical fluency and quantitative literacy, but what really makes the difference in the marketplace is the ability of our students to think critically, to communicate extemporaneously with comfort and poise, and to exhibit confidence, not hubris,” said Brent Chrite, President of Bentley University.

Helping students gain and demonstrate these attributes is the thinking behind BentleyPlus, a competency development program focused on encouraging experiences that lead to dispositions such as resiliency, purpose, and agency. While reflecting the business university’s high regard for the liberal arts, BentleyPlus is a separate and intentional effort to get students to understand that marketable skills are not confined to the classroom.

BentleyPlus began as a pilot in 2021 and is now a university-wide effort combining career readiness with dimensions of wellbeing. The program involves four major pillars, starting with an introductory program where first-year students select two out of 11 competencies to work on throughout their time at Bentley. The competencies, such as ethical reasoning, leadership, and work ethic, are organized into three buckets: cognitive skills (Think), intrapersonal skills (Develop), and interpersonal skills (Act).

Students are then encouraged to pursue co-curricular experiences that help them develop these competencies — not by adding more to their plates but by making what they’re doing more meaningful. BentleyPlus advisors meets with students three times a year to help them reflect on their experiences and articulate their value. An awards ceremony with a BentleyPlus certificate completes the program.

While a nod to the university’s holistic pedagogy, BentleyPlus also reflects a concern, among employers nationwide, about the lack of “durable” skills in entry-level employees — everything from communication and collaboration to grit and work ethic. Another factor driving the project is the persistent emotional and mental health issues college students and recent graduates are reporting, including disengagement with work and school post-pandemic.

While a nod to the university’s holistic pedagogy, BentleyPlus also reflects a concern, among employers nationwide, about the lack of “durable” skills in entry-level employees.

As vice president of student affairs, Andrew Shepardson has his eye on all of these phenomena. He sees BentleyPlus as more evidence of the university’s long history of student-centered education. In 2014, Gallup released the groundbreaking Gallup Alumni Survey, originally known as the Gallup-Purdue Index, showing the influence of certain college experiences on career readiness and wellbeing. Shortly afterward, Bentley became one of the first schools in the country to enlist Gallup in conducting its own alumni survey.

As with the national research, Bentley’s alumni reported higher levels of wellbeing correlated to experiences like “having professors who make me excited about learning,” “having someone who cared about me as a person,” and actively participating in extra-curricular activities.

“That information was huge for us in terms of sending a strong message to our students and faculty,” Shepardson said. “You may be a finance major fixated on working at a hedge fund, but you would really benefit from taking a discussion-based humanities course or working on an initiative off campus.”

Shepardson said that while students regularly participate in co-curriculars, he noticed they can struggle to articulate how these experiences transfer into skills in the marketplace. He recalled one example of a senior who became flummoxed when asked in a job interview how his experience as president of a club had helped prepare him for the position he was seeking.

“He made no connection between this significant leadership experience and what might be expected of him in the real world,” Shepardson said.

A natural partner for BentleyPlus was the team from the Pulsifer Career Development Center, who, as front-liners, recognized the importance of curating durable skills in addition to academics. “Our career folks thought this was phenomenal,” said Lauren Hubacheck, assistant vice president for student affairs. “They said, ‘We can do all the career development work with our students, but you all are connecting tangible stories that show skills like dialogue and leadership.’”

While focused on competency building, BentleyPlus eventually took a stronger turn towards wellbeing, as Hubacheck and Shepardson began to see this as the through line in all of the work they were doing.

“Employers were telling us that the greatest number of leaves of absences were with entry-level employees and for wellbeing purposes,” Hubacheck said.

In talking with his staff and colleagues around the country, Shepardson was hearing about disengaged students whose anxiety was keeping them from talking with their professors or connecting with other students.

“It became apparent that wellbeing was the higher order,” Shepardson said. “We needed to give students a clear understanding that their ability to work on a competency was not going to be successful if they didn’t have that wellbeing piece in place right from the beginning.”

This year, BentleyPlus 2.0 was launched with its own strategic plan; a full-time associate dean, director, and assistant director; and a commitment from leadership to promote wellbeing in all aspects of university life.

The Underlying Competency

Rebecca Jimenez is the newly hired associate dean of wellbeing and BentleyPlus. She said she had her first “pinch me” moment when working the negative mindset table at orientation, where students were asked to select from an array of cards displaying unhelpful concepts like blame and self-doubt.

“I said to them, ‘Let’s work on how to change that,’ and they loved it. They did the exercise with such intention. I thought, Wow, they really care about this stuff.”

Jimenez had been working on what she calls “wellbeing communications,” an effort to help people understand what wellbeing means in their lives and to arrive at a definition that incorporates all of its associated elements. Often confused with wellness (mindfulness and yoga), wellbeing can mean different things to different people. After extensive research, Jimenez created a new wellbeing narrative for the university that is part of the BentleyPlus strategic plan.

“Wellbeing at Bentley is a dynamic balance of personal and community wellness, where students feel supported, connected, and empowered to flourish,” the plan now states. “It’s about caring for oneself, making intentional choices, nurturing meaningful relationships, and engaging in environments that promote joy, purpose and belonging.”

As part of the BentleyPlus first-year program, students take a wellbeing self-assessment and develop wellbeing goals to be addressed over time with their advisors. Right now, all of the BentleyPlus advisors are student affairs professionals, but the enthusiasm they convey in working one-on-one with students has attracted the interest of other community members, including faculty.

For Jimenez, bringing BentleyPlus into the classroom is an important next step.

“Not only can we make wellbeing front and center in the classroom, we can help faculty connect what they are doing with wellbeing outcomes. We can help them say out loud to their students: ‘What we’re doing here is critical thinking.’”

As with the pilot, the new version of BentleyPlus has the strong backing of career services. Staff there suggested that first-year students participate in the wellbeing self-assessment prior to a popular career development course, acknowledging that wellbeing work proceeds career prep. Perhaps most significant is the new way they encourage graduating students to consider their career choices.

With support from BentleyPlus, they now ask: “Does the organization you are interviewing with align with who you are as a person? Do they value building relationships and connecting with others?”

These may just be the questions today’s employers are waiting to hear.

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.