EAST BATON ROUGE PARISH’S I CARE program is continuing its work of equipping students for a healthy, safe and drug-free future by partnering with the LSU Psychology Department to provide no-cost mental health counseling to those in need.

Students can be referred to the Healthy Minds program—a collaboration between I CARE and LSU—if they are having difficulty with such mental health issues as depression, anxiety and fears, impulsivity and hyperactivity, inattention and poor organization, or self-harm and suicidal thoughts.

“In our current environment, mental health services are hard to access, especially for students in socioeconomically challenged backgrounds,” says I CARE Director Gwynn Shamlin. “Students have trouble accessing these services, not just because of money, but also in terms of time and transportation. A program like this brings services to the schools.”

The services consist of evaluations to diagnose potential mental health problems, as well as treatment to help resolve the problems. Students receive services at school from LSU psychology doctoral students supervised by a licensed school psychologist. Currently, the program is only able to help a small number of students. In the future, Shamlin says, he would like to see the program expanded to allow doctoral students from other nearby universities to serve students as well.

Shamlin noted a spike in students’ stress levels and instances of depression following recent periods of community unrest and widespread local flooding. “Addressing those concerns was a priority to us,” he says. “When students struggle with mental health concerns, it impacts the entire community. If we can provide these services to kids in a school-like environment, it relieves the stress placed on all of our community infrastructure.”

Any student can be referred to Healthy Minds if they meet the following four criteria:

• the student has experienced one of the mental health problems covered by the program for the last three months or more;

• the student’s problems seem to cause severe distress to the student and/or impairment in the student’s academic, personal or social life;

• the student is willing to participate in the mental health evaluation process; and

• the student’s parent is willing to participate in the mental health evaluation process.

Parents, teachers and students can make referrals by meeting with the school’s I CARE specialist and letting him or her know they have a referral for Healthy Minds. The services are funded by I CARE and LSU psychology department volunteers. They are provided at no cost to students and their families.

James Upright, LSU graduate student and Healthy Minds coordinator, says students in the program generally experience improvements in behavior—those improvements are tracked through weekly or bi-weekly scientific measuring and through anecdotal evidence. In particular, students who were making suicidal statements tend to make less or none of those statements following treatment, Upright says.

While Healthy Minds usually works with students one-on-one, Upright says small-group counseling is also offered following tragedies to help students to process and talk through those experiences.

“Mental health tends to be an area where people only get services if they are more well-off financially,” Upright says. “It’s fantastic, from the point of view of a mental health counselor, that these resources are being provided at no cost.”