How 9 NC college newsrooms came together to cover mental health — and focus on solutions
Content warning: This article contains mentions of suicide and death, topics that will be disturbing to some readers.
Emmy Martin was just several weeks into her first year at UNC-Chapel Hill in the fall of 2021 when a string of student deaths by suicide shook the university community. A year later, she watched from Chapel Hill as nearby NC State University experienced similar tragedy.
The deaths — and the broader issue of mental health among college students — left a lasting impact on Martin and her fellow students.
“A student death is so impactful to a community,” Martin told The News & Observer. “But on the smaller and more personal scale, almost every single person I know has struggled with mental health. It’s a very normal part of college life to talk about mental health, talk about your mental illnesses and how you struggled.”
With the tragedies at both campuses in mind, Martin, who is a junior at UNC and the editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel, applied last spring for a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network to cover the overwhelming issue — with an eye toward partnerships and putting a spotlight on answers and solutions.
She received the grant, and after months of work and reporting, the resulting project, the Mental Health Collaborative, launched online and in printed papers last week.
And The Daily Tar Heel, though certainly an integral part of the effort, is just one player in a much larger collaboration.
Collaborating on mental health
The Mental Health Collaborative’s work includes more than 30 reported stories and seven opinion pieces, covered by The Daily Tar Heel and eight other college newsrooms across North Carolina: The Chronicle at Duke University, Technician at NC State, The A&T Register at NC A&T State University, The Niner Times at UNC Charlotte, The Seahawk at UNC Wilmington, The East Carolinian at East Carolina University, The Pendulum at Elon University and The Old Gold & Black at Wake Forest University.
The project is guided by a solutions journalism framework, described by the Solutions Journalism Network as reporting that “investigates and explains, in a critical and clear-eyed way, how people try to solve widely shared problems.”
Martin said the framework was key to grappling with the enormity of the issue, which transcends campus boundaries and is “so big and so nuanced.”
“Looking at a problem that’s so big with a solutions lens is tough, because there’s no cure-all, right, for mental health,” Martin said. “But I think it’s so important to look at these big issues with that lens, because there could be small steps toward a future where students feel more provided for and more supported in their university community, but also within the larger North Carolina community.”
The students pursued stories on their own campuses, but met weekly as a group to give progress updates and discuss their work. The Daily Tar Heel hosted an in-person brainstorming session for all of the newsrooms in November, using some of the grant funds it received.
The resulting stories cover a wide range of topics related to mental health, exploring how students, faculty, staff and administrators at the universities are addressing the issue through support groups, research, training and other efforts.
Individually, the stories show challenges — and successes — related to mental health at each campus. Collectively, they reveal commonalities among the colleges.
“Mental health concerns are shared by people across the state, no matter what campus they’re on,” Martin said. “But also, students at every campus face more unique circumstances that make the mental health issue specific for that campus.”
The News & Observer is publishing two of the stories in an effort to bring wider attention to the students’ reporting:
From Martin and Technician’s Emily Vespa, an in-depth look at how NC State and UNC communicate with students and the broader campus about student deaths, and the steps both universities have taken to improve mental health resources after the spate of deaths and suicides at both campuses.
From Dasia Williams of The A&T Register, a look at the stress of borrowing federal student loans, which students at historically Black colleges and universities are more likely to do, and how addressing rising tuition costs could improve the problem.
Focusing on solutions, the future
Reporting on mental health can be daunting and exhausting, and it can even exacerbate journalists’ own mental health struggles for those who experience them.
Anticipating the project would require additional time and work by student reporters, Martin said The Daily Tar Heel used much of the grant funding it received to provide monetary bonuses to those involved with the effort. It wasn’t a perfect solution, she admitted, but instead just one gesture to “ease some of the burden.”
Despite the demands, Martin said the reporters were enthusiastic to be involved.
“This was a project we all took on together as this, I guess you could call it an extra burden, but everyone treated it as a opportunity and also a privilege, which was wonderful to see,” Martin said.
The students’ work appeared to pay off, with “a lot of great response” pouring into the newsrooms since the project launched, Martin said.
Martin said the project opened the doors to additional collaborations among the newsrooms in the future, whether to report more on mental health or another topic that spans several campuses.
“I find that sharing experiences like that really benefit every single newsroom involved,” Martin said. “I think there are so many issues that could benefit from a collaboration of student newsrooms and student journalists.”
Find more Mental Health Collaborative stories
The Mental Health Collaborative, with links to stories from all nine newsrooms, is available online at dailytarheel.com/article/2024/03/mental-health-collaborative.
Mental health and suicide prevention resources
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with someone, dial 988.
Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To speak with a trained listener, text HOME to 741741. This free, confidential service is available 24/7.
