A recipient of Elon’s Leadership Prize, Perry Elyaderani is taking a three-pronged approach focused on better understanding the mental health issues college students grapple with and seeking to reduce the stigma many attach to mental health.
It wasn’t until Perry Elyaderani ’18 returned home to the Cleveland area in May 2015 that it clicked — he had been suffering from depression during his first year at Elon.
Surrounded by classmates, academic work and social activities on Elon’s campus, he had known he was feeling differently, but wasn’t able to put his finger on what it was. It took leaving that environment and focusing on different things for him to realize just what he had been through.
“It was just strange. It didn’t feel like everything I was told depression would feel like,” Elyaderani says. “I didn’t even realize I was depressed at the time. I didn’t realize until summer came along and I came out of it.”
That realization started a personal journey that has Elyaderani seeking to better understand the mental health challenges college students are facing. He’s doing that through research and public discussion, with a particular focus on the mental health of young men. A recipient of Elon’s Leadership Prize, he’s working to destigmatize the mental health issues that many in society grapple with through a series of videos he’s producing of people talking about their mental health.
“I didn’t feel like I knew what was going on, and I thought other people would be in the same situation,” Elyaderani says. “Physical illness and mental illness should be identical in how we perceive them, but we know that’s not the case.”
A senior majoring in journalism and chemistry, Elyaderani is taking a three-pronged approach to his work with mental health in collaboration with his mentor Alexis Franzese, associate professor of sociology and a licensed psychologist. With the support of the Leadership Prize, a $10,000 award that enables a student to develop a practical solution to a larger problem, Elyaderani is undertaking a comprehensive survey of Elon students to better understand the mental health challenges they face and how they perceive mental health issues.
Elyaderani worked with Franzese to pursue additional support through Elon’s Fund for Excellence, and the two worked together to organize the Student Mental Health Conference, to be hosted by Elon on April 7 with the goal of bringing together university faculty and staff, community health leaders, and students to consider the topic of mental health from multiple perspectives. The day-long event, supported by the Fund for Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, incorporates a keynote address on issues surrounding student suicide as well as panel discussions about campus and community mental health.
Finally, Elyaderani is drawing on his skills as a journalist with Elon News Network to produce a series of short videos of Elon students and faculty talking about their mental health, and steps they have taken to address any issues they have, as well as videos of people thanking those who have helped them as they have struggled with mental health issues. “We want people to share what they are passionate about, share what makes them great, and follow that with what they struggle with and how they got out of it or how they’re tackling it,” Elyaderani says. “The goal of these videos is not to be cheesy or overly dramatic but to make it normative. That’s how we can destigmatize it and make it normal.”
A news report, then the Leadership Prize
Elyaderani’s passion for journalism has helped fuel his interest and research into the mental health of college students. A member of Elon News Network since his first year at Elon and now evening anchor, he developed an interest in health reporting and focused an assignment early in his journalism career on male depression and suicide.
That class project is part of what led him to pursue the Leadership Prize when he returned to Elon after participating in the Elon in LA program. The Leadership Prize would offer him the opportunity to engage with the topic for a longer period of time with the goal of developing a plan for action rather than solely focusing on academic inquiry. “It goes back to that journalism class when I realized I had only scratched the surface,” Elyaderani says.
He was quick to approach Franzese to serve as a mentor given her expertise as both a mental health researcher and as a practicing psychologist. He had earlier interviewed her for an ENN piece on the preoccupation with the mental health status of presidential candidates. “I thought, ‘who would be a better mentor than someone who understands this from a sociological perspective and also from the perspective of a psychologist,” Elyaderani says. “She was the best of both worlds.”
Franzese says she was impressed with Elyaderani from the first time they interacted as he was interviewing her for the story he was working on. “It felt like an incredibly important topic to me,” she says of Elyaderani’s focus on mental health.
“Fingers on the pulse”
A primary focus of Elyaderani’s Leadership Prize research is on a comprehensive survey of Elon students to gather anonymous data about their experiences with and perceptions of mental health issues. The goal is to share the survey results with Elon so the university can better understand how well its infrastructure meets the needs of students and supports them as they are faced with these challenges.
“As faculty and staff, we can have a sense of what students are facing, but the understanding that the faculty and staff may hold is not the same as those who have the experience of being a student at Elon,” Franzese says. “We want to identify what students see as holes, how they feel they need to be supported and where students turn to for help.”
Elyaderani’s work comes as Elon has seen some incidents of student suicides in recent years. The university has moved to address the issues of student suicide and mental health by working with the JED Foundation, which is one of the nation’s leading organizations partnering with schools, families and communities to promote emotional health and reduce the risk of suicide among teens and young adults. The university is also increasing the number of counselors on staff within Counseling Services to help meet the rising demand for mental health care resources that Elon and other universities have experienced in recent years.
Elyaderani’s survey will help support those efforts by providing Elon with a better picture of the student experience. The survey focuses on areas such as depression, anxiety, social connectivity as well as suicide. Franzese emphasizes that the survey is anonymous and is not designed as a screening tool to identify students who may be facing mental health issues, but rather to give a sense of the scope of concerns and perspectives on campus. “It’s to help us put our fingers on the pulse of what’s going on on campus,” she says.
Once the data is collected and trends are identified, Elyaderani plans to assemble focus groups of students from different demographic groups to drill down into some of the findings from the survey. “For instance, if the survey finds that males in fraternities have greater rates of depression, we can bring together students in fraternities to discuss what other factors they have in common and form a better picture of what’s happening,” Elyaderani says.
Student Mental Health Conference
Another key element of Elyaderani’s deep dive into the mental health of college students will take place on April 7, as members of the campus community and experts from the area gather at Elon to share research findings and experiences at the symposium he has organized.
Creating an opportunity for public discussion of the mental health issues college students grapple with factors into the goal of destigmatization, Elyaderani says. “We’re hoping to bring together people from all walks of life — from different religions, gender identities, backgrounds — to talk about mental health,” he says. “There are so many opportunities to make connections where previously they didn’t exist.
Delivering the keynote address will be Kelly Cukrowicz of Texas Tech University. A professor of psychology in the Department of Psychological Sciences and a licensed psychologist, Cukrowicz has conducted extensive research on depression and suicide with the support of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. She’s received the Edwin Shneidman Award for Early Career Contributions to the study of suicide by the American Association of Suicidology.
Participants can also take part in morning and afternoon sessions exploring topics such as identity and mental health, religion and stigma, the role of educational institutions in creating positive impacts and how links to the community can encourage mental health. Up to 100 free copies will be available to attendees of “If You Feel Too Much,” the best-selling work by author Jamie Tworkowski.
Those gathered for the conference will also have the opportunity to participate in a service activity in the afternoon as the conference draws to a close, with participants writing letters of appreciation to people who have helped them through a difficult time. More details about the conference are available here.
Breaking down barricades
Elyaderani is truly combining his passions for journalism and making a difference in the mental health of college students with his work on producing a lineup of videos of Elon faculty and staff talking about the challenges they have faced. The videos, which will run between three and five minutes each, are designed to be shared on social media with the goal of helping a broader population understand that people like themselves struggle, too.
Franzese says that people accept the fact that their physical health may change from day to day or month to month, though most of the time people are generally healthy. Physically, we get sick and better and we can have acute and chronic issues, but we don’t take the same view for mental health, she says.
“The narrative we propagate as a society is that you’re just supposed to be healthy, from a mental health standpoint,” she says. “Most of us are basically mentally healthy but we have fluctuations at times – we get sick, and we get better. It’s just part of your story.”
And just as with physical health, there are preventive actions a person can take to help care for their mental health, such as sleep hygiene, exercise, proper nutrition, taking time to meditate or be outdoors and doing things with a sense of purpose, Franzese says. Those go a long way to help maintain a sense of wellness, she says.
Elyaderani’s personal experience with depression has made him realize the fears people have about sharing what is happening with them. He says people don’t understand that depression is something from which you can emerge and that it’s common for many people to have one or two depressive episodes during the course of their lives.
Telling the stories through these videos of people who are contending with mental health issues and those that have overcome them is a way to break down some of the barriers that keep people from seeking help, Elyaderani says. “Because there is such resistance to this topic, there are so many mental barricades you don’t realize you have,” Elyaderani says. “The thing that has shocked me the most is how avoidable these issues are, and how much help is out there, how much support is out there.”
His research and work on these various projects have led him to talk more freely with his friends about his own challenges, and he’s been met by support and understanding, he says. “On a day-to-day basis, it can be so easy to communicate your feelings and get that support, but we don’t ask for that support,” he says. “I think that’s the most painful realization — that it can be so easy to say you’re struggling and ask for help.”
Elyaderani’s work goes a long way to helping better understand the issues college students are facing and to encourage them to share those struggles and reach out for support, Franzese said.
“We can contribute to getting that word out, letting students know through these shared experiences that this is a place where you don’t have to hide away this part of yourself,” Franzese said. “We hope this contributes to students having an awareness that Elon is a place where you can be all of who you are.”