The Office of Multicultural Affairs is offering minority students support they may not always find on campus through two support groups — The Circle and Sister2Sister — beginning Monday and spanning eight weeks.
Sister2Sister is a weekly support group for minority women to discuss different topics focused on issues relevant to them. The Circle is a coed support group focused on helping students build interpersonal and communication skills.
LaKeitha Poole, coordinator of African American Student Affairs, said the groups were created in 2011 because students would often be put on a waitlist when seeking help at the Student Health Center’s mental health services. These groups were her solution for students who were looking for support and unable to find it elsewhere.
“It got started just as an additional resource to what the health center offers but just having more specific focus on our ethnic minority students,” Poole said.
It is important to Poole to offer services directed toward minority groups because of the negative stigma surrounding mental health in African-American communities, she said. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health, between 2007 and 2008, about 9 percent of African-American adults received treatment for mental health concerns, compared to 16 percent of white adults.
“We know that there is a stigma around counseling among ethnic minority populations,” Poole said. “So we don’t want people to think that because I joined Sister2Sister or The Circle, I’m crazy.”
Many students’ views on mental health have changed after attending a session.
“I think a lot of students come in thinking they’re going to sit me on a sofa and tell me about my issues, and that’s not what it is,” Poole said. “It’s really about having someone who looks like you that you can come to and have that in common.”
After the group gets a certain number of members, the sessions are no longer advertised and the location of meetings aren’t made public to avoid making students feel stigmatized.
“It makes sense for you to not have heard about it, because if you saw it in passing and you weren’t interested, you probably didn’t see it again until maybe another semester,” said Poole.
Several students feel these groups can be beneficial to minority students on campus, including psychology sophomore Isis Landry.
“It’s good to have a place to go to if you feel that there is not someone that can specifically give you what you need, and this is a program that obviously is geared towards trying to do that,” Landry said.
Sports administration junior Virtuous Poullard also said these groups are good for minority students, specifically for African-American women.
“Meetings for black women together is really good because a lot of the time within the culture here, they don’t really click together or encourage one another,” Poullard said.
Poole said offering these groups lets students make connections with one another and shows them that counseling can be what they want it to be.
“If they have no clue about mental health, they come in and learn that it doesn’t have to be that bad or scary thing you see on TV, movies or that maybe even our own families make it out to be,” Poole said.