Why do you need to empower faculty, staff, and students in mental health care? Video Transcription Anne Browning, Ph.D. | Founding Director, UW Resilience Lab | University of Washington Anne Browning, Ph.D. (UW): This is important because we are experiencing a pretty dramatic increase in mental health concerns in our student population. Actually, that's also mirrored among our faculty and staff as well. The World Health Organization this summer put out an article that looked at students entering higher education in 19 different universities across eight different countries and they were seeing that 35% of those students were screened positive for one of six prominent mental health disorders. So, over one third. So, it's not just a local issue where we're seeing counselors not being able to keep up with demand for mental health supports on campus in terms of direct services. We're seeing this as a global challenge and so we have to get way more thoughtful. We know we're not going to be able to meet the resources and demands of direct service models where you know we can't just continue to throw more counselors and mental health professionals at higher ed institutions. We just won't fill the gap. As a response to mental health concerns, we as institutions need to focus on resilience and compassion as a way to create more upstream interventions that kind of takes some of the pressure away from our direct service models of supporting students especially around mental health and well-being. Knowing that capacity and the costs are getting so over-taxed there, we want to make sure that students who absolutely need to see a counselor have access and part of creating that access that we're hearing wait times across not just our institution but across the country for students to access mental health professionals is increasing dramatically and the drive and need for mental health professionals is increasing. So, the more upstream interventions through courses, through programming, through integration of themes across programs is a way to actually kind of shift the narrative and support students across the board. I mentioned that this isn't just about students. I think one major issue we see is that institutions try to just program at students especially around mental health and well-being. If faculty and staff are not embodying the work and doing the work themselves students won’t pay attention to the messaging. So, overall this has to be a community-wide, global approach to well-being and compassion on campuses if we actually want to move the dial and create a different type of institution, so we have people having different experiences of well-being on our campuses. To that end, that this isn’t just a student issue, this is a student, faculty, staff, community issue. It would be hard for me to give you a job title that wouldn't be impacted by this. This is our counselors. This is our academic advisors. We do a tremendous amount of work with faculty to support our faculty and thinking about embedding well-being into their curricular spaces. This is kind of soup to nuts everyone. This is our deans and vice provosts. This is our institutional president like having to kind of think about and respond to this work in real time.