Just Flag It

Solutions to help college kids with their health tend to still rely on the student to reach out which “rarely happens” if you are suffering from depression, eating disorders or anxiety.   Colleges ought to use a database that collects input from professors about students who have missed classes.  If a student is missing multiple classes and across multiple courses this could create a flag in the system and prompt student services to reach out.  I say this as someone who barely knows how to open an excel document, much less create a flag in a system, but these kinds of solutions will be important if the country wants to seriously change the narrative around suicide.  In a good step, more college health programs are partnering with behavioral health contractors. Companies like Mantra Health and Uwill have partnered with hundreds of college campuses across the country to offer digital mental health services to students.  “I like the database idea because you create a more holistic set of information,” says Haley Gregory, an MSW from New Jersey. “Leaving it up to one professor at these big schools, even small ones, is asking a lot – the students will invariably find their person, but the question is when.”