By D’Mari Dreher-Smith
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
As students navigate the ever-changing world, it is important that they have the resources they need to maintain their mental health, a public speaker who focuses on wellness told a Towson University audience Thursday morning.
Jasmine Williams, who bills herself as an adversity and resilience speaker, said she knows what it is like to face major life challenges because she lost her brother when she was a freshman in college.
Throughout that period, Williams said, she struggled through her mental health, adding that she quickly learned that there was no roadmap for her grief or opportunities for the support she needed.
“There were days after I lost my brother that I didn’t go to class,” Williams said. “And they weren’t excused absences.”
While she found ways to cope within herself, he learned what it is like not to have proper resources. Now she advocates for what she calls “building your mental health action plan.”
Williams spoke as part of Towson University’s Well-Being Summit, which was held on campus Thursday and also included breakout sessions and a keynote address by Bernadette Melnyk, an expert on mental health and well-being intervention research.
The summit comes in a year when Towson instituted a wellness day for students, which allows them to take a day off from classes when they need a break. Other schools in the area have put similar measures in place.
Williams, a nationally recognized speaker featured in various media outlets like USA Today, spoke in a fireside chat to promote and normalize the discussion of student well-being and early intervention.
To an audience of staff and students, Williams stressed that mental health challenges can happen to anyone, at any time. As a result, she said, students should focus on mental health preparation as an emergency protocol.
“We all do the fire drill because we never know who will be affected,” Williams said. “We never know who will be affected by crisis.”
She used the fire-drill metaphor to stress the importance of students having a mental health plan before they need it. Just as fire drills are practiced in advance to ensure safety, mental health must be prioritized, and students need to develop coping skills to ensure health and stability, she said.
Williams outlined four key components of a strong plan: maintenance, comfort, support, and resources.
Maintenance, she explained, is the day-to-day work that goes into managing one’s wellness. Healthy habits such as physical activity, stress relief practices, and daily routines that ground you are the first step to long-term wellness, she said.
Comfort strategies or “favorite things,” according to Williams, can be as little as a sweet treat that you rarely have that brings you joy or comfort.
While maintenance and comfort focus on self-regulation, support and resources encourage students to look for outside help in times of need. Support systems like friends and family and access to hotlines and therapy, complete Williams’s framework for a proactive mental health plan tailored to your unique needs.
“I think it’s so important we have it now, because there are things that students are navigating that they don’t tell us as professors and faculty, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not going through something hard,” Williams said.
Williams said programs like excused wellness days and other resources to support students are especially important for this generation of students.
“When I was a student, we weren’t getting breaking news straight to our phones,” Williams said. “We had more separation of what was going on in the world versus what we were responsible to focus on as a student. It’s important you have these resources when the world and when life is very stressful.”
Once she finished her remarks, she asked the audience to send her questions and feedback, wondering what mental health programs they believe need to exist but don’t.
Williams concluded by offering local and national resources to the audience and encouraging them to continue the conversation with her and have a clearer understanding of how to support themselves and others.
1 Comment
I really wish we had these types of services when I was in my first year of college. I lost an aunt to AIDS and I was confused about what I was feeling. I ended up totally ignoring why I was in college, not going to class and using terrible methods to cope with those feelings!