The counseling department has started an Anxiety Support Group which began this month on December 6. The support group takes place once a week during grizzly period and is a 4-week program. The topics covered during the meetings include “my anxiety”, anxiety in the brain and body, and anxiety processing and support skills, which will help students find ways to continue to have anxiety support. Amanda Hansen and Danielle McHugh of the counseling department are leading this initiative to provide more support in an area that has been identified as a need by the needs survey that was conducted earlier in the year. 

“We added a question on our needs assessment and had over 100 students interested in participating,” said Ms. Hansen.  

Students who expressed interest in the needs assessment were sent out a packet that provided the dates and times, the topics the group would cover, and the group norms. The group norms include understanding and respecting confidentiality and the right for students to pass if they do not wish to speak. 

Depending on how the first round of the anxiety support group goes, there may be support groups like this one in the future. The counseling department encourages students to let them know if a support group like this would be helpful to them, and to provide ideas for what other issues they could try to make groups like this for. Anxiety was listed as the top concern among students according to the survey and the counseling department hopes to find more ways to support students who experience it.  

“I think we’re excited that it’s going really well, and students seem really engaged in it. They’re finding it meaningful, which is really important to us, and they’ve said things like we should have a class in this, we should do this longer, and we should do this more often,” said Ms. McHugh. 

“Every year we do a counseling needs assessment and anxiety has been the highest social/emotional need for students every year,” said Ms. Hansen.  “We thought this would be a good support that will allow students to connect with one another, support one another, build coping skills and feel less alone in their experience with anxiety.”