Re-Envisioning Our Prevention Journeys, Realizing Our Collective Influence

As student affairs professionals, we are keenly aware that college students are arriving on campus with increasingly complex mental health and alcohol and other drug abuse issues. In addition, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and stalking have become part of the collegiate landscape. As the prevention and intervention field has come of age during the past several decades, what we thought we knew-and how we believed that we could make a difference – has been redefined and re-envisioned…and, for many of us, has affected our professional journeys in ways that we could have never imagined.

When I earned my PhD in Clinical Psychology in the mid-1980’s and began working at our campus counseling center, I anticipated that my work day would involve meeting with students for assessment and testing and the provision of individual and group counseling and consultation services exclusively. As I moved forward in my professional journey, I soon learned that, in order to be effective in reducing risk and promoting resilience among our college students, it has been critical for me to have an understanding of the individual student, the broader student body, and the systems I work in as a practitioner, administrator, and faculty member. It was also very important for me to recognize that mental health concerns, alcohol and other drug issues, and sexual assault and violence do not occur in a vacuum; often, when we intervene with one of these areas, we are affecting the others. Though it makes sense that, in an ideal world, we are addressing mental health, alcohol and drug use, and violence issues concurrently, the organizational structures within our institutions and the external bodies to whom we report often compartmentalize these issues, requiring us to seek new pathways to learn, serve our campuses, grow professionally, and succeed.

During the past decade, my annual participation in the NASPA Strategies Conferences: Alcohol and other Drug Abuse Prevention, Mental Health, and Violence Prevention has offered me an invaluable opportunity to redefine my own professional journey in a number of ways. The focus of the conferences is on a comprehensive public health approach that highlights the intersections among mental health, AOD, and violence issues. This framework has generated new ideas, fostered new collaborations, and lit the spark for future successes. Further, unlike many professional meetings and conferences which define program and intervention successes based on statistical and clinical significance, the NASPA Strategies Conferences offer a “real-life” view of the issues we face and provide a straightforward, honest look at what we can learn from our successes and challenges…and, yes, even outright prevention and intervention failures. We are afforded a unique opportunity to network with our colleagues from diverse backgrounds, professional specialties, and campus environments. We have forums to talk about how changes in higher education – a greater focus on retention, scarcity of resources to conduct our work, and variations in organizational commitment to prevention – affect our goals and progress. Most importantly, we have a chance to give and receive support that energizes us to keep moving forward, even on those dark days when we wonder if we are making a difference at all.

It is undeniable that the fields of mental health, alcohol and other drug prevention, and violence prevention have come of age in recent years, as have my own professional conceptualizations of these issues. It is also undeniable that, individually and collectively, we are persisting, thriving, and helping our campuses be safer and more resilient. And, as we all move forward in our journeys, it is undeniable that NASPA has provided us with a professional home as we realize our own individual and collective power to make a difference on our campuses.

About the author: M. Dolores Cimini is the Assistant Director for Prevention and Program Evaluation Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Albany, SUNY and a member of the 2016 Strategies Conferences Planning Committee.