Flames Flourish Mental Wellness Resources
Helping a friend, a student, or yourself manage a mental health challenge starts with access to reliable information. This page has key tools and resources to empower supportive action. As an individual who cares, your role is to simply listen (without judgement), offer supportive or reflective statements, provide resources, and connect. Acts of connecting include helping to make a phone call, staying with student until help arrives, giving individual the resource flyer below, walking with a student to the UIC Counseling Center and checking in at some later point to see how “things are going.”
Supportive tools to grow your knowledge and inform your actions include: two presentations, a faculty guidebook, and a resource sheet that covers mental health and student basic needs.
Flames Flourish Mental Wellness Resource Quote Heading link
“You don’t need to counsel; you just need to care.”
Faculty Guide to Supporting Student Mental Health (JED) Heading link
The primary role of faculty is to share knowledge and expertise with students. This role, places them in a trusted authoritative position that students turn to when they are struggling with academic or life concerns. Knowing what to say or do to guide students to campus or community resources can be uncertain territory for some, this guide helps to demystify that process.
UIC Mental Health and Basic Needs Resource Sheet Heading link
Finding answers to help a student find shelter, food, academic and mental health support, starts with the UIC resource sheet which provides information on meeting basic needs and helping a student during an emotional or physical challenge. See link below.
Mental Health/Basic Needs Resource Sheet
Learn How to Help a Distressed Student Heading link
Below are two presentations, the one on the left is for faculty and staff helping a distressed student and the one on the right is for the student helping a distressed friend. These presentation, created by the JED Foundation, provide research informed practices on how to help a student experiencing a mental health challenge.
