Mental Health Strategies

With 2 million students in post-secondary institutions in Canada, mental health is a growing and pressing societal problem. The Mental Health Commission of Canada wants to help post-secondary institutions support and promote mental health and wellbeing for students. In this webinar, you will learn about supporting mental health for post-secondary students, the Inquiring Mind Post-Secondary mental health training program, and an introduction to NEADS will be provided.

The Best Practices Network conducted an environmental scan of existing post-secondary mental health strategies across Canada, from 2009 to 2019, and identified common and differing themes with respect to their development process, organizational structure, strategy components, key recommendations, and evaluation. 

This presentation aims to provide an overview of 24 mental health strategies of universities and colleges from across Canada. Common drivers, approaches and practices related to the development, implementation and evaluation of Campus Mental Health Strategies will be highlighted. The presentation concludes with evidence-informed tips and recommendations for future directions.

Use these tools to plan and host your dialogue and to submit your input to the CSA Group technical committee.

The University of Alberta (U of A) Suicide Prevention Framework outlines a five-part framework for enhancing suicide prevention. Specifically, the report identifies 36 recommendations across the five categories to build upon student, staff, and faculty mental health and wellness services and to improve the capacity and capability for suicide prevention at the U of A.

OCAD University and Ryerson University have embarked on a creative partnership together, collaborating around the development of best practices in campus mental health strategy. OCAD U is using design thinking as a participatory process to gather input and to understand students’ experiences with mental health on campus in order to inform the mental health strategy. OCAD U is also using art as a community engagement tool to raise awareness about mental health and to reduce stigma on campus.