A former Macalester College mental health counselor hopes to fill the gap she sees in information about coping strategies for college students with a new book due out in February.
Mia Nosanow, a licensed psychologist who spent more than two decades as a mental health counselor at Macalester College’s student health and wellness center, says colleges are already helping new students learn the basics of surviving on campus through orientation programs. But she believes that an important element is missing from these welcome-to-campus programs.
“A lot of it’s about the basics, like how to use the library, where to go if you need study help. They serve as an introduction to college,” Nosanow said. As well-intentioned as these programs they may be, Nosanow thinks college leaders are missing an opportunity to talk to new students about supporting their mental health.
“They might say, ‘You need to sleep’ or, ‘here are some typical relationship issues,’ but they usually say it in just one or two sentences,” Nosanow said. “That’s not enough. First-year courses need a much more robust mental health component.”
With that belief in mind, Nosanow wrote “The College Student’s Guide to Mental Health: Essential Wellness Strategies for Flourishing in College,” a practical, tip-filled book designed to help college students learn how to face some of the biggest challenges of young adulthood. She hopes that the book will help start a conversation on campuses about the importance of helping students talk and learn about common mental health issues.
[image_caption]Mia Nosanow[/image_caption]
“It could be part of a first-year course that everyone is required to take,” Nosanow said. “This approach would take mental health out of the counseling center and into the regular world where it belongs.”
Nosanow said her book isn’t designed just for people with a diagnosed mental illness. “This book is for everybody, to elevate the fact that if all of us in a community work on our mental health, and if a college values it, it becomes just a part of life, something that is completely normal to discuss and address. This is the kind of work that should happen before a mental illness arises.”
“Just as we want students to learn how to write a thesis statement when they come to college, we also want them to learn how to take care of their mental health when they get here. We are educating students, and part of that is about how to take action on their own mental health,” she added.
Focused on young-adult mental health
For most of her career, Nosanow always knew that she wanted to work with young people. She started out in broadcast journalism and mass communications, but eventually, she said, “I realized that wasn’t the right place for me.” Young people had often turned to her as a mentor, so she went to school to become a counselor.
In graduate school Nosanow said she learned about theories of the mind, techniques for counseling clients and how to talk to others and listen deeply. But when she got into the real world of working with young adults, she quickly realized that much of her work was actually focused on helping her clients develop practical strategies for dealing with day-to-day problems. While Freudian theory was an important background, simply walking her clients through the basic adjustments of adult life was central to her practice.
One issue that kept coming up was students struggling to get enough sleep in the new, exciting world of college. While she was earning her master’s in counseling psychology, Nosanow said she never had a class on sleep. But it turned out to be a much bigger issue for her young clients than she’d ever anticipated.
“Everyone knows that you need sleep to be a healthy human being,” Nosanow said. She chalks up much of her young clients’ sleep struggles to the rise of smartphones and social media: “A lot of sleep issues began to emerge at the time of the iPhone.” Phone use, she believes, “can get in the way of basic self-care, like feeding yourself and getting exercise.”
Another issue that often brought students into Nosanow’s office was adjusting to a new social environment. She recalls first-year students come to her office crying. “They’d say, ‘I haven’t made a friend yet.’ They were so lonely. I would say to them, ‘I am here for you, and I am going to help you make friends. Here’s a way to do it.’”
Many of her clients suffered from some degree of social anxiety. “A lot of young people are very close to their families, so maybe they didn’t need friends in the same way as they do when they are on their own. I helped them figure out how to make friends for themselves.”
Nosanow relished the opportunity to guide young people through this exciting and stressful life phase.
“It’s this incredible time period where they get out from under the wings of their family and are introduced to so many new experiences,” she said. An experienced guide like a mental health therapist can play an important role in their development, she said.
This deep understanding and decades of experience led Nosanow to start thinking about writing a book. She said she saw a lot of “evergreen themes” coming into her office, and she wanted to put them together in a guidebook of sorts, a source that would present readers with practical ways to care for their mental health.
“Everyone deserves to get a roadmap for how to work on their mental health,” she said. “I’m hoping this book can do that for college students.”
Focused on the ‘nitty gritty’
There has been much conversation and concern around the reality that young Americans are facing mental health challenges at higher rates than any time in history. Nosanow said she saw this truth in her own practice, and she has isolated a few factors that she believes to be the source of youth mental illness.
She said that the serious crisis for youth mental health started to take off around 2012: “There was the fallout from everyone getting iPhones and the fallout from social media and the 2008 economic crisis. That’s when suicidality started to climb. I was seeing it in my caseload. I really started to feel like something serious was happening.”
Professionals and prognosticators talk about ways to address this crisis, but many seem to be spinning their wheels, Nosanow said. “For years, everyone in mental health has been talking about, ‘How do we get upstream of this? How can we get more information to students so they can take care of themselves?’”
She saw an audience of young people who might not be interested in dense prose focused on psychological theories but could use a book that offered clear tips, advice and strategies for bolstering their own mental health.
“I’m not a theorist,” Nosanow said. “I’m a true practitioner. My whole career was in the trenches. I wanted to write the most practical book I could so students could get the help they need.”
She focused her chapters’ topics on perennial issues that came up with her clients.
“People need the nitty-gritty details.” Nosanow said. “Students would ask, ‘What do you mean I can’t scroll on my phone for two hours and then get a good night’s sleep?’ They want helpful information and resources that back that up.”
While the book is designed to provide resources and information in clear, easy-to-digest chapters that can be consumed in one sitting, it weighs in at a hefty 360 pages. The length was inevitable, Nosanow said.
“I based the book on what I saw in my office, what students are bringing in, the common stuff that people are working on. So there’s a lot there. I wrote the shortest book I could write.” She thinks it could be a good textbook to accompany a first-year course on mental health and is in conversation with several colleges around the country about how such a program could be launched.
Now retired, Nosanow sometimes misses the years she spent supporting student mental health. She felt honored to deeply listen to her young clients. Just being seen by another person is, she said, “so healing in itself. In my practice, I wanted to give hope, to say, ‘You think that this can’t be changed, but guess what? I have seen people change and improve their lives.’”
While the work was sometimes exhausting and overwhelming, Nosanow said she knew she was providing an important service to her clients. She hopes she can continue to do that with her book.
“No matter how tried or burned out I felt, I always knew I didn’t want to see one more kid who was hurting,” Nosanow said. “It always felt like that young person was coming in with their heart in their hands. It was such an important moment for me to be completely present. That was a gift and an honor.”
