May is Mental Health Awareness Month. However, mental health encompasses a far large canvas: 365 days and 24/7. That is without a doubt actual at UC Berkeley, in which programs to help college students, college and personnel maintain growing, whilst the population needing that help continues growing. For example, Berkeley’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), part of University Health Services (UHS), reports an 8 percent growth from the 2017-2018 academic year to date in students searching for help.

Mental fitness

“On campus, May is a pretty extreme month,” says Leslie Bell, an employee help counselor at University Health Services’ Be Well at Work – Employee Assistance program. “And which could result in plenty of disturbing situations. But we have a very well-educated team of workers here, people who understand the university lifestyle. It’s comprehensive and superb.”
“Faculty and group of workers in this campus have to get admission to splendid mental health offerings. Not everyone who needs the help is achieving out for it at the same time,” she provides. “Treatment is to be had. And for individuals who were searching for it out, the help can improve lives.”Services to be had for school and staff consist of free and confidential counseling and referrals at Employee Assistance, previously referred to as Care Services, and get right of entry to ongoing counseling thru employees’ medical insurance plans.

According to CAPS, the maximum commonplace motives that personnel and college seek help there are work-associated stress, relationship issues, and tension and melancholy. For college students, the root causes of tension and pressure consist of the educational rigor at a tough group, career concerns, and insecurity approximately housing, meals, or budget, says Dr. Guy Nicolette, assistant vice chancellor UHS. According to a latest examination by using a studies crew led by Richard Scheffler, a Berkeley professor of fitness economics and public coverage, charges of anxiety ailment among college students at Berkeley tripled between 2008 and 2016. “I suppose everyone acknowledges this is a countrywide phenomenon — the rise of university students supplying a few mental fitness distress,” Nicolette says. “Our venture is to try to assist each pupil with the resources we have.”

Nicolette breaks his group’s goals right into a triad. It desires to meet college students where they are, as first-rate it may. It desires to invoke all the assets Berkeley has to be had. And it wants to see humans earlier when they are in misery because, he says, “higher effects can also manifest quicker.” Much of the nation of intellectual fitness at the campus, Nicolette says, has to do with primary needs — food, housing, and lessons. Affordable housing, that is in brief supply, can be especially demanding. There are college students who’re homeless. And some have a place to live but who’ve different housing-associated issues.

“With the cost of housing being what it’s far in Berkeley, students are probably to position more people in a place that would normally match,” Nicolette says. “That can result in problems. It’s a domino that knocks over different dominoes.” A spring 2017 survey by way of the National College Health Assessment (NCHA) of Berkeley undergraduate and graduate college students requested them approximately problems they located “disturbing or very hard to address.” Leading the way have been academic problems at 56.Four percentage and profession-related issues at 34.9 percentage. “The stress of dwelling in the Bay Area with the high fee of dwelling and the political climate factors in,” Bell provides.

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