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The Indiana Daily Student

PHA brings focus to mental health

Bella Shu, Panhellenic Association vice president of personal development, said she believes in the power of numbers. With this belief in mind, she said she thinks her most recent work with the PHA will truly be able to make a difference.

The PHA has just created a mental health committee. This initiative, like Safe Sisters or the Body Project, is meant to bring greater attention and awareness to issues many college students face, 
Shu said.

“I think that for the past few years, IU has done a better job of handling issues like sexual assault, but mental health is still something that often gets swept under the rug,” Shu said. “So we wanted to discuss how we can address it within our own community.”

Seventy members from 16 different sorority chapters on campus attended the committee’s first meeting. Though the structure and form of the committee have not been fully laid out yet, the large amount of initial interest is 
encouraging, Shu said.

The plan for now is to model the committee after PHA’s Safe Sisters, which focuses on sexual assault, or the Body Project, which focuses on body image, by creating a training program for new members and bringing in educational speakers to talk about different aspects of mental health, Shu said.

“All of these programs are clearly separate entities, but serve similar purposes,” said Mackenzie Clinger, a junior in Alpha Omicron Pi who is a member of the new committee. “So while we don’t want to take away from what Safe Sisters and the Body Project are doing, it makes sense to partner with them and come together to create different events with them.”

Another goal is for members of the committee to be everyday points of contact for sorority chapter members, said Rose Lowery, a member of the committee from Kappa Delta. It is easier to create a wider dialogue about mental health issues by starting small with friends and classmates, she said.

“Mental health problems are something that affect a much wider group of people than a lot of students realize,” Lowery said. “I wish it was a conversation that started even before students got to college. Our goal is to make sure that nobody feels like they have to struggle alone.”

More long-term goals for the committee include the creation of subcommittees for specific aspects of mental health and potential collaboration with the Interfraternity Council and the rest of campus, said Sara Dobbins, who will be taking over as the PHA’s vice president of personal development in the spring.

The first year of the mental health committee will be considered a learning year as its members figure out what types of events and campaigns work best, Dobbins said. She said she wants the process of developing the committee to be as 
collaborative as possible.

The Interfraternity Council has also put measures addressing mental health into place.

Trevor Wolf is the IFC’s first director of mental health. In the new position, he has taken the approach of improving proactive education on mental health so fraternity brothers know how to help each other before a bigger problem arises, he said.

“There are so many times when the only way we can get people to talk about mental health is after something horrible happens, and it shouldn’t just be something to talk about after the fact,” Lowery said. “That proactivity is how it should be talked about, and that’s what we’re trying to encourage as a community.”

While the committee sees the need for further mental health conversation and hopes to see continuing involvement, the real hope behind its creation is that it will someday no longer be needed, Dobbins said.

“Our end goal is actually that the mental health committee will be dissolved because that would mean that we wouldn’t have such drastic mental health issues to address,” Dobbins said. “It would be great to no longer have the problem, to see students feel safe and healthy. But because there’s a need for it now, I’m excited to be able to help.”

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