Mental health, recreational services aim to help LSU students cope with stress as finals week approaches

Ana Conejo
·2 min read

BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — As finals week approaches, LSU is emphasizing different ways to cope with stress.

Graduate students Emmanuela Wade and Marina Deyoe-Pedraza consider exercising and taking care of mental health are important factors during finals week.

“School is coming to a fast end,” said Deyoe-Pedraza.

“Yes, rapidly. It always happens during the fourth quarter when it’s like, oh, you got to get everything done. It’s the final countdown,” said Wade.

Wade and Deyoe-Pedraza are ready for classes to end. They describe it as a stressful time, especially for this semester.

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“It’s hard because you’re trying to be a student and you’re trying to do the responsibilities that you have as a student, but also recognizing that you’re like a citizen of the world and things that are happening in the world also still affect you,” said Deyoe-Pedraza.

LSU directors emphasize the need of using available resources to cope with stress. Laurie Braden, executive director of University Recreation at LSU, said the exercise center has been helping many students.

“There’s a lot of evidence and research around physical activity, movement and play that contributes to learning. Last week, we recorded 25,000 visits here at UREC by over 9,000 distinct individuals. Just last week alone,” said Braden.

Braden said students benefit more than just workout machines but many other ways to stay active, such as meditation, Pilates classes, high intensity interval and more.

Raime Thibodeaux, director of Mental Health Service at the LSU Student Health Center, also said the demand of mental health services have been up and most importantly been placed as a priority.

“Making sure that students are attending to their mental and overall well-being and health is super, super important,” Thibodeaux said.

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Thibodeaux also said the benefit of the services is that they are indeed free of charge for students, helping students who may have worries of not taking care of their mental due to cost.

“So, one of the really great luxuries of our center is that our therapy services are completely functioning off of the student health fee. So, this is a fee that gets included in tuition and fees automatically when students are enrolled full time. And so that means that when they come to us for therapy services, essentially no money is exchanging hands and it’s kind of already been paid for,” Thibodeaux said.

For more information on mental health services, visit here.

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