Staff members on the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation’s College Mental Health Education Programs team: Paul Cherchia (from left), Chelsea Cobb (CAMED’17), Ali Theis (SSW’18), Kayla Hoffstein, and Kelly Morrow.

Mental Health

Combating Loneliness and Creating Healthy Relationships

BU’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation is working to help students build interpersonal skills and thrive in their communities

The reports are in, and they’re grim: young people in this country are struggling.

The United States recently dropped out of the top 20 on the world’s happiest countries list, a fall driven by Americans under 30 reporting feelings of loneliness and general dissatisfaction with the world. Last year, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an epidemic, pointing to its debilitating effects. Experts say loneliness can contribute to increased risks of strokes, dementia, heart disease, and premature death.

“For a variety of reasons, young adults come to college with less developed interpersonal skills,” says Dori Hutchinson (Sargent’85,’96), executive director of BU’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation (CPR). “The pandemic, the use of technology to an extreme, their highly structured childhoods—I think we see the consequences of these influences in the growing amount of cyberbullying, rising rates of debilitating anxiety and depression, and the growing number of students who express loneliness.” 

Enter the CPR, a mental health research, training, and clinical services center led by Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences that’s dedicated to helping individuals of all ages with psychiatric disabilities. The center does not diagnose conditions, prescribe medications, or provide treatments. Rather, it offers comprehensive services and programs that give clientele the abilities and support needed to succeed on whatever path they’ve chosen for themselves. 

A place to go when you feel alone

Sargent’s CPR has implemented a number of programs aimed at helping students at BU and beyond when things get hard. 

College Mental Health Education Programs (CMHEP), one of the CPR’s core initiatives, offers a collection of services—such as classes, one-on-one counseling, and even group workouts—designed to help students living with mental health conditions or feeling adrift or alone. 

The flagship offering is NITEO. Latin for “to shine” or “to thrive,” NITEO is an intensive, semester-long program for students who’ve had to take a leave of absence from any college or university for mental health or substance dependency reasons. The in-person program prepares them to resume their education through a host of resiliency- and academic skill–building activities. 

One of the key components of NITEO is the Healthy Relationships curriculum. 

Healthy Relationships is a set of 25 lesson plans that help students develop a sense of self and of belonging within their communities. (Healthy Relationships is also offered as a restorative justice course for respondents in Title IX cases.) Among a litany of objectives, the group lessons help students understand what constitutes a healthy relationship versus one that violates cultural or legal norms, learn about giving and receiving consent, assess what they value in romantic partners and friends, and build general communication abilities.

Healthy Relationships is also part of LEAD BU, a one-credit wellness and academic skill–building course available to all BU students. (Students can register on StudentLink.) The semester-long course covers classroom topics like test-taking strategies and presenting projects, while the wellness portion integrates the Healthy Relationships curriculum to teach students self-care and interpersonal skills.

Healthy Relationships, piloted in the summer of 2019, grew out of an online course on relationships for autistic adults codeveloped by Emily Rothman, a Sargent professor and chair of occupational therapy. The CPR’s version uses Rothman’s course as a springboard. The lessons constantly adapt in response to student feedback and staff observations. But at their core, they teach participants how to build and maintain relationships—which can combat loneliness, says Chelsea Cobb (CAMED’17), assistant director of CMHEP and one of NITEO’s facilitators.

That’s also where the curriculum’s recent tweaks come in. Part of the CMHEP’s job is to identify what issues students are struggling with and what skills they need to learn to overcome those issues. Following the COVID-19 lockdown and the feelings of loneliness it exacerbated, the CMHEP added lessons on topics such as effective interpersonal communication skills, how to develop new friendships and enhance ongoing ones, and the benefits and challenges of technology like social media and dating apps, Cobb explains.

Helping students learn how to make meaningful connections is integral to the center’s broader mission, Hutchinson says. 

“Our primary value is personhood—that is, that everyone matters, that people who live with mental health conditions matter, and that their lives matter,” Hutchinson says. “My personal mission is to ensure that we can continue to conduct innovative research, training, and services that support people who come to us in flourishing.” 

Flourishing, she adds, includes a sense of social connectedness. “A growing number of students indicate that they are not flourishing,” Hutchinson says. “I see our college mental health services as ways that we are contributing to combating the loneliness epidemic that students report.” 

Creating space for community

Both Hutchinson and Cobb say that one of the greatest strengths of the Healthy Relationships curriculum is that it’s adaptable to any population or situation. For example, the CPR has worked with colleges as far away as the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland and the University of Alaska to offer the curriculum to their students. 

Another strength: students in the same cohort often end the course as friends.

“In class, we’re always asking the group: What would you do? How would you respond to this situation?” says CMHEP senior training associate Ali Theis (SSW’18). “It takes time to build that community, but you get to the point where students are sharing their experiences and working through things together. That takes vulnerability. That added piece of cohesion is something I’ve really loved about the curriculum and the spaces it’s created.”