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Bruins need support after tragedies, but UCLA won’t tell them where to get it

(Andrea Grigsby/Illustrations Director)

By Selby Kia

Nov. 20, 2019 10:51 p.m.

At UCLA, trauma after campuswide tragedies is an inconvenient truth.

What shouldn’t be inconvenient, though, is students’ ability to find resources to help cope with trauma.

In 2016, a murder-suicide that took the life of a professor on campus rocked the UCLA community. With a recent rise in shootings sweeping the nation, namely the shooting that occurred just an hour away from UCLA at Saugus High School last week, it is clear that this threat remains very much alive in our country. What is not so clear is where students should go in the wake of grief from these tragedies.

Students should not be expected to resume college as usual after a shooting on campus. They depend on UCLA to provide them with a safe home, and when an event destabilizes that, everyone is affected.

Despite ongoing issues with mental health services on campus, UCLA has access to a plethora of independent mental health resources and programs. In the case of a traumatic event, the university has a responsibility to reach out to students using every resource at its disposal, which means initiating conversations and creating avenues for students to process these events. This can be achieved by promoting available resources on campus to students and having resident assistants hold floor discussions on the Hill.

Millie Unti, a UCLA alumna, experienced trauma firsthand.

Unti was in Moore Hall Room 100 for her chemistry lecture, but her professor never showed. Soon, students received a BruinAlert warning them to stay on lockdown because of an active shooter on campus.

“I was so shaken up, I went to my room and stayed in my room all day,” she said. “I didn’t even go to class the next day.”

Unti was not alone in feeling scared after the events that day.

“A lot of people didn’t go to class for a while, just because of the stress – I told a professor I couldn’t take a final in Moore because I couldn’t go back,” Unti said. “Just being in Moore was traumatizing, I haven’t been in Moore since then.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, Counseling and Psychological Services held extended hours for walk-ins, and UCLA designated four “healing spaces” for students to come together.

But students don’t deserve temporary and limited spaces to force their healing in.

 

What’s more, students can be dissuaded from attending CAPS after traumatic events due to the organization’s history of limited capacity and emphasis on treatment for severe psychological issues. But long-term mental health issues aren’t the only thing students face, and in the case of a campuswide tragedy, UCLA has the responsibility to advertise options outside of CAPS.

One of those options is the Campus and Student Resilience program. Through weekly drop-ins, trauma-informed yoga, healing workshops and mindfulness training, the program provides students with an effective way to cope with stress year-round without being formal therapy.

While campus resources like these are available, many students don’t know or think about them, especially after a trauma.

Elizabeth Gong-Guy, the director of the program and formerly of CAPS, said that peer-led support groups were available to all students after the 2016 shooting.

“A lot of students would not have an opportunity to talk about the experience and what they were still anxious about,” Gong-Guy said.

The Screening and Treatment for Anxiety & Depression program also provides students with free treatment for mental health concerns, as well as evidence-based methods of coping with stress.

In some ways, these programs sound like the answer to students’ prayers. They validate the trauma students have gone through and don’t force them to normalize their experiences, but rather, process them in an accessible space.

Unfortunately, hardly anything has been done to promote them – after the 2016 shooting, students were never even notified about the CSR program’s expanded outreach of support groups.

These preventative programs don’t just help students – they could also serve to relieve the burden on CAPS, which seems like a win-win for UCLA.

In the email Chancellor Gene Block sent after the Saugus High School shooting last week, he called for students to practice kindness and mentioned CAPS as a resource. What he failed to mention was the presence of the CSR Program, STAND and other options for students.

And spreading kindness can only get students so far in the healing process.

Healing doesn’t even need to take the form of an official organization. Ben Kesner, a UCLA alumnus, said his RA in Hitch Suites brought students together to discuss what happened after the 2016 shooting.

“We had a floor meeting where we talked about it in small groups and that was a surprisingly effective way to (deal with it),” Kesner said. “It was comforting knowing so many people had gone through a similar situation and just being able to talk it through was really helpful.”

This is exactly what students need. With shootings like Saugus or Thousand Oaks, the campus is in close proximity and students might know others who were affected. Group discussions and on-campus support groups give them an opportunity to talk openly with others who are experiencing similar feelings, without the pressure of going to CAPS.

Of course, it may be easier for UCLA to brush over events like the Saugus shooting along with the rest of the news cycle, since nothing of that scale has happened on campus since 2016. But students are not so quick to recover. And it would be in the university’s best interest to give students the time to heal and process these traumatic events. At the very least, they could inform students of the resources avaliable.

The way kindness starts is with each other – after all, we never know when these tragic events may hit home.

But spreading kindness is difficult when they don’t have the support to leave their own emotional lockdown.

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Selby Kia | Opinion columnist
Kia is an Opinion columnist.
Kia is an Opinion columnist.
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