NAMI on Campus

Katherine Barlow, Cheyanna Snyder, Lindsey Swihart, and Troy Weathers

Some things are easy to talk about. Some things aren’t. And sometimes it takes a group of students willing to create an organization that is working to make room for discussions about the hard topics to make these easier to talk about. National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is doing just this. NAMI is a new organization on Wittenberg’s campus that is working to make it easier to talk about Mental Illness and to raise awareness for it.

It all started with NAMI’s president Troy Weathers and its Vice President Cheyanna Snyder. Troy had contacted NAMI International over the summer to start a chapter on Wittenberg’s campus, and NAMI International replied later saying that there was another student on campus working to get a NAMI chapter here, Cheyanna. The two were able to connect and work together to create a constitution and to gather officers to make NAMI on campus a reality. It was important to them that this became an organization.

“I think that we know on campus we don’t have that many mental health resources so we wanted to kind of create a student led movement for that,” Weathers explained. “We really want to raise awareness so people know it [anxiety and depression] might not be normal college stress,” Snyder added.

We all get stressed out as college students, but NAMI wants us to understand the difference between stress and mental illness. “Mental health is obviously really important to our age group because most mental illnesses start between the years of 18-24. So that’s like college exactly,” Weathers said. “One in four college students typically have a mental illness or at least have symptoms of one. So if you think of our campus of 2000 students that could potentially be affecting 500 students on our campus right now.”

However, NAMI is alert to these facts and wants us all to be as well. They are working to provide some programing and raise awareness. Movie showings about mental illness and a poster campaign that highlights facts about mental illness are just two of the ideas they have that will create a space for discussion.

“It’s a complicated discussion, but I think that’s why it needs to be talked about because it is so complicated, and if we don’t talk about it, people will have these misconceptions about it. It’s in the shadows, but not in the open,” Snyder explained.

In addition to movie showings and the poster campaign, NAMI is working to create a peer-to-peer safe space where students can talk about mental health issues in a non-biased, stigma free environment.

“The peer-to-peer aspect is a lot less threatening I think to a lot of students. Even the name of our safe space is going to be called SPHERES [Students Providing Help, Education, Resources, and Encouragement to Students], which is a really long acronym but the first and last letters are both s’s, which stand for student, so it’s really student to student, and we wanted to emphasize that,” Weathers said.

Student to student. NAMI is focused on how we can better our Wittenberg community. They care about our Witt family to the point that they are working hard to open the heavy doors of mental illness discussion and awareness. They want us to be knowledgeable about this very real issue that is greatly impacting not only our university, but also universities around the world.

Weathers and Snyder would like everyone to know that it is okay to talk about mental illness, and it is okay to get help. “People think they’re alone and that’s not the truth. If you’re struggling with mental health issues, it’s okay to ask for help,” Snyder shared. “It doesn’t mean that you’re weak or you aren’t a good student. It just might mean that you need a little bit more help,” Weathers added.

NAMI, we are proud to make you a Hero of the Month. Thank you for all you have done, are doing, and will do for Wittenberg University.

– Camila Quiñones