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Rehabilitation
Research and Training Center (RRTC) programs,
funded by ACL’s National
Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation
Research , conduct advanced research and
training to improve health, employment, and community
living outcomes for people with disabilities. RRTCs also
serve as a network of information hubs to connect
researchers, service providers and people with disabilities
to the rehabilitation research. As the RRTC on community
living and participation for people with serious mental
illness, the Collaborative
for Community Inclusion at Temple University focuses
on research and knowledge-development activities that lead
to interventions to help people with serious mental health
conditions participate fully and meaningfully in their
communities.
For example, the RRTC is studying the effectiveness of a
promising peer support intervention that uses photovoice to
promote campus engagement by college students with serious
mental health conditions. Photovoice is a process in which
participants capture their experiences and observations in
photographs and discuss them with other participants.
Created in 1992 as a tool for social change, photovoice has
been shown to have an empowering
effect on participants and has been adapted for
a wide variety of interventions and research projects.
In the RRTC study, which began in 2018 and has recruited
half of their study sample, college students with serious
mental health conditions take photos over six weeks each
fall and spring semester. The pictures represent their
current or desired engagement on campus, barriers to
engagement, and things that facilitate engagement. Students
share their photos, along with a caption, for discussion on
a private social media page. This online community allows
students to connect with and support each other day to day
throughout the semester. Three “meetups” each semester,
facilitated by an interventionist with a background in
recreational therapy, offer the students opportunities to
connect in-person or virtually.
In this guest post for Mental Health Awareness Month, Kyra
H. Baker, Research and Intervention Coordinator for the
RRTC, shares more about the project.
Photovoice
and Campus Engagement of College Students with Significant
Mental Health Issues
By Kyra H. Baker, Research
and Intervention Coordinator
Collaborative
for Community Inclusion at Temple University
(ACL’s RRTC on Community Living and Participation for
People with Serious Mental Illness)
Education is crucial to employment, and individuals with
significant mental health issues have much lower
educational attainment than the general population.
Research conducted by the Temple University RRTC indicates
that campus engagement among college students with mental
health issues, just like for other students, is critical to
academic success (see references below). Campus supports need
to go beyond a focus on symptom reduction and
accommodations and expand to include helping students
integrate and connect to others on campus.
I am the co-designer of an intervention we are studying
that aims to support college students with significant
mental health conditions in increasing their campus
engagement in areas that are meaningful to them. The
intervention is inspired by photovoice methods and involves
participants sharing photos related to campus engagement to
create a dialogue about what they are doing or want to do
and barriers and facilitators of campus engagement. I ask
students to keep this in mind when taking their photos:
“Think about your ideal week as a college student—focus on
those activities outside of the classroom. What do you most
want for yourself? Where do you want to spend your time?
What is standing in the way? What would help you get
there?”
There have been many memorable photos. One student shared a
photo of a bowl of cereal and through the dialogue with
other students it became clear that this was significant
because it represented the first time the student had gone
to the campus dining hall—an activity she had been ‘working
up the courage’ to do. Her peers responded with words of
encouragement and celebratory emojis.
Last year, during the pandemic, a student shared a photo of
the corner of a chair in a student lounge. This student had
talked about how he longed to hang out in the student
lounge with other students in his major, to casually
discuss what projects everyone was working on, and to feel
a part of things.
During our final gathering of the year he joined the zoom
meeting from that lounge and his peers stumbled over one
another to ask: ‘Hey!...where are you?… are you in the
lounge??”
“Yess!” he said, “I’m at my place! I’m home.”
I will never forget the sights and sounds of that joyful
moment and many others that have occurred through this
study.
References:
- Victoria Jeffries & Mark S.
Salzer (2021) Mental health symptoms and
academic achievement factors, Journal of American
College Health, DOI: 10.1080/07448481.2020.1865377
- Mark S. Salzer
PhD (2012) A Comparative Study of Campus
Experiences of College Students With Mental Illnesses
Versus a General College Sample, Journal of
American College
Health, 60:1, 1-7, DOI: 10.1080/07448481.2011.552537
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