Well-being for Life and Learning: Recognizing and Supporting Students in Distress

As reported by the American Psychological Association (Abrams, 2022) college campuses are facing an ever-growing need and demand for mental health services for their students. With these challenges on the rise, signs of stress and distress are permeating across all components of student life in and out of the classroom. This presents a unique challenge and an opportunity for faculty and staff, to recognize and support students when they are facing these difficulties and to connect them with a network of further resources and support. It is also true, though, that the risk of compassion fatigue and secondary trauma for those faculty and staff is ever growing as evident by a study conducted found that one in five (21%) of student affairs professionals had moderate to high symptoms of burnout, which was inversely correlated with job satisfaction and positively correlated with turnover (Mullen et al., 2018 as cited in Jackson Preston et al., 2021).

In this workshop, participants will be able to:

Become familiar with common areas of concern for students

Recognize 3 signs of stress or distress

Develop and practice 3 ways of addressing concerns with students

Identify 3 self-care strategies to prepare for, and decompress after difficult conversations

Open to all faculty and student support staff. More information on locations of workshops and registration available on MyPath by looking up the workshop title. Learn more about and register for the self-paced Well-being for Life and Learning Training Program.