The Healthy Minds Study survey returns to Suffolk University until March 9 as a way to find where students are struggling mentally and how Counseling, Health and Wellness can further help students.
Students received an email Feb. 9, marking the start of the Healthy Minds Study survey being available to students. Three weeks prior, Laura Golitko, assistant director of CHW, gave a presentation to the Student Government Association regarding the survey.
The Healthy Minds Study is one aspect to becoming a JED Campus, which is a four-year long program that has a focus on improving student’s knowledge and access to mental health services on college campuses across the nation.
Suffolk University has been a part of this program since 2022. Being a part of the JED Campus program requires the university to send out the survey twice; once at the start of the program and then again at the end of the four-year cycle.
Stephenie Kendall, the executive director of CHW, has been involved in the JED program? for nearly 10 years and with the Healthy Minds Study survey in recent years. She is one of the co-chairs that are in charge of the distribution and reacting to the results of the survey.
For Kendall, the Healthy Minds Study survey is not only for Suffolk students, but for college students nationwide. It allows Suffolk to compare itself to other universities and gives other colleges the same opportunity.
“This effort is bigger than CHW,” said Kendall.
The answers are recorded at Michigan State University and compared nationally to other colleges in the JED Campus program. In the last Healthy Minds Study survey, Suffolk received 1014 responses, which was found to be comparable to other universities that participated in the survey.
Kendall hopes to see a similar record of responses to the survey in 2022, but one thing she noted was that the diversity of the student responses they received was not entirely reflective of Suffolk’s student body on campus.
“My hope is that we have a wide variety of students participating. This survey is for everybody,” said Kendall.
The outcome from the previous survey was workshops and presentations for students on how to help a fellow peer get the help they need if their mental health has been impacted, Kendall explained.
As Suffolk students showed a slightly higher percentage of students reporting moderate or severe symptoms of anxiety compared to the national average, CHW increased their attention on anxiety and ways to mediate that following the survey.
“It wasn’t that we stopped paying attention to depression…but we started to offer more screening tools for anxiety,” Kendall said.
As they are entering the halfway point in the survey being available to students, they will begin their “second phase of roll out,” Kendall said. This will include a reminder email for students and more postings about it across campus in the next two weeks.
The Healthy Minds Study survey is located in their university-provided emails, in which a personalized link is enclosed and will take them to the anonymous survey form. The online survey will take 25-30 minutes to fill out. Students are able to start the survey and come back to it at a later date.
Once completed, students will be entered into two sweepstakes; one at a national level and another through Suffolk University, which is offering 100 $10 Dunkin’ Donuts gift cards. The Healthy Minds Study survey will be available to students until March 9.
