Students Prioritize Mental Health Awareness through "The Bandana Project"
The Bandana Project is most recognizable on campus by the green bandanas tied to the backpacks of students, staff and faculty. Those with a green bandana have resource cards that have local and national mental health resources for students to access.
Saint Louis University sophomore Avery Downes, who is double majoring in social work and psychology, advocates for mental health resources and support for fellow peers through the Bandana Project chapter on campus. Resources at Saint Louis University can also be found on the Bandana Project website.
Support for [student] mental health comes through identifying with others who might be going through the same thing,” Downes said.
Across the nation, colleges and universities have taken initiatives to hear and address accounts of the mental health of students. The student-led initiative, Bandana Project, is a national organization founded on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in 2016, and now has more than 40 chapters across the country on college and high school campuses, including SLU.
Dan O’Connell, senior and project director on campus, is working to have additional mental health first aid training to provide SLU's 750 mental advocates with the tools and skills to interact with someone who is having a mental-health crisis.
The project has two goals: suicide prevention and mental health awareness.
“The Bandana project shows me how little people know about how to talk about their mental health or what resources are available to them as students. [There are] so many resources in St. Louis that students including myself are not aware of and don’t know where to start looking for them,” Downes said.
The green bandanas leave a door open for support for students, while fostering conversation about how to dismantle the stigma surrounding mental illness and normalizing seeking care.
“A lot of people don’t have a good set of coping skills - which are not really taught to us in our curriculum, so being involved in social work and either working in a school or private practice with kids and young adults, I hope to use my degrees to help people learn coping skills,” Downes said.
As a student, Downes hopes to empower students to have ownership of their mental wellness on campus. As a future clinical social worker, she hopes to empower children and young adults to cope with mental health and achieve greater well-being.
Through the project, Downes learns about challenges students have in seeking and accessing mental health services to support their own coping structures in the St. Louis area. Part of her involvement and that of other students in the Bandana Project has been to advocate for greater access to mental health services.
College for Public Health and Social Justice
The Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice is the only academic unit of its kind, studying social, environmental and physical influences that together determine the health and well-being of people and communities. It also is the only accredited school or college of public health among nearly 250 Catholic institutions of higher education in the United States.
Guided by a mission of social justice and focus on finding innovative and collaborative solutions for complex health problems, the College offers nationally recognized programs in public health, social work, health administration, applied behavior analysis, and criminology and criminal justice.