“At the university we have mechanisms to provide support to our community of professors and students on issues related to mental health, but more needs to be done.”
The initiative will enter into force starting next year, through a team selected by the university. This team will be responsible for assessing the current campus environment, and making recommendations on how to ensure that campus culture de-stigmatizes mental health issues, and promotes and supports the mental health and well-being of all members of the community.
space to “blow”
Hania El Shalkami, a professor at the Center for Social Research at the American University in Cairo, is one of the team whose tasks include making recommendations on how to establish a system of psychological services and respond to stress at the university. In a telephone conversation with Al-Fanar Media, she says that the change that we have witnessed in our public life, in recent years, has increased the area of psychological stress, and we have become more vulnerable to accidents and diseases as a result of pressure, explaining that the “heavy” exposure to social networking sites and the public space has left great effects. On our psyche, regardless of social or physical background.
At the beginning of this month, Al-Shalkami led a workshop inside the university, to survey the views of the participants, professors and students, on providing a platform for the university community, aimed at exchanging experiences and ideas to improve mental health inside and outside the university campus. She adds that the psychological burden has become a collective issue, affecting both students and professors.
She also points to the emergence of new symptoms of these psychological burdens, such as sharpness, anxiety, and distraction due to daily pressures, stressing that the university realized that ignoring this matter would make the consequences “very difficult”, and would reflect on academic performance, and might turn into a mental illness, as she put it. .
The Egyptian Academy suggests that there be an online platform for university students to share their personal problems and get advice as well, as well as consider it as a space to “reveal.”
The initiative is scheduled to work on three axes: changing the university’s culture on mental health, through campaigns to destigmatize mental illness, raising awareness and programs, increasing the level of mental health services at the university, improving its policies and protocols, and providing training on mental health.
Al-Shalkami says that the campaign should be multi-element in its psychological, sports, sexual and emotional dimensions, so that these elements share a vision and one goal about awareness of the nature of mental health, and the privacy associated with it, the confidentiality of mental health information, and the waiting time until obtaining On services, and the stigma associated with mental illness inside and outside the lecture hall. It also explains that the campaign is an attempt to create an environment conducive to mental health at the university, and to make an “important shift” in dealing with psychological stress from being “individual” cases to designing a good mental health environment that meets the needs of everyone with the aim of protection and prevention.