A new chapter of the national student mental health group, Active Minds, may soon be meeting at Dartmouth.
Having met with the Harvard chapter of the organization, Joanne Kim '05 now intends to bring Active Minds to Hanover.
Kim was already volunteering as a Sexual Abuse Peer Advisor and a volunteer at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock psychiatric ward when she attended a meeting of the Harvard chapter over Winter break.
When she returned to campus and witnessed some peers dealing with mental health issues, Kim decided an advocacy group would provide beneficial support network, complementing the services already provided at Dartmouth, she said.
"Many disorders like schizophrenia and depression emerge around college age," she added. "With the formation of Active Minds, people who haven't been introduced to psychology yet can get a safe place to be open about their experiences and form alliances."
"Also there's not a lot of dialogue, so people here who struggled with depression feel like they're pretty alone, especially with the intensity of this campus."
Kim has contacted several administrators, including Nancy Pompian at Academic Skills and members of the counseling staff at Dick's House.
Last fall, the Student Health Advisory Committee (SHAC) organized a mental health awareness week, which Kim said got a lot of positive feedback
The awareness week featured panel discussions and screenings for mental health issues.
But Kim said she hopes Active Minds will be able to focus exclusively on mental health, unlike SHAC, which deals with a plethora of student health issues.
The Dartmouth Active Minds chapter would be an educational resource rather than a support group, according to Kim.
"We're not a support group. We can have dinners for people to talk about their own issues, but my group is really about planning events and also disseminating information," Kim said.
The group would coordinate events on campus to raise awareness. Kim has proposed bringing Andy Berman to campus to speak about his best-selling "Electro Boy," a memoir on bipolar disorder that will be turned into a movie starring Tobey Maguire.
Kim highlighted several important concerns she hopes her group will address.
"There are some issues for our generation that are pretty important. Psychiatric drugs are a pretty new thing, and there are always new drugs coming out. We would discuss overmedication, even the concept of mental illness, because there is an anti-psych movement as well," she said.
She also noted the potential impact of a recent $27 million lawsuit filed against MIT by parents of a student who committed suicide.
The student's parents claimed MIT failed to inform them of their daughter's risk for suicide.
