Mental health, wellness and microaggressions on campus were the topics of discussion last Friday Sept. 16, during a visit by Dr. Richard Shin, Associate Professor in the Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education Department in the College of Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. Shin spent the day meeting with students and administrative, support and counseling staff to discuss student wellness and how to create a more inclusive campus.

During a lunch with students, Shin presented his research, which focuses on, among other things, “racial bias among practicing mental health professionals [and the] integration of social justice principles in the fields of counseling and counseling psychology,” according to the University of Maryland College of Education website.

He discussed the ways he believes many mental health professionals unintentionally engage in microaggressions, or “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults…which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership,” as defined by Psychology Today.

“There is a tendency among mental health professionals to attribute all of someone’s problems to their identity,” Shin said, citing an example of what he said was the tendency of some heterosexual therapists to attribute all of the problems of LGBTQ-identifying persons to their sexuality.

Shin also discussed the “western-ness” of mental health, in response to a question about how to get more international students to take an interest in their own mental health and wellness, saying that mental health counseling is a very western and European concept. Oftentimes, he said, counseling takes a very European perspective even within non-European and non-western cultures. According to Shin, there is a need for more cultural humility and openness to diverse cultural identities among mental health professionals. “Simply,” he said, “it just means to be more open to listening to others.”

Earlier in the day of his visit to campus, Shin also met with administrative, support and counseling staff, along with student life support staff from Residential Life, the Department of Public Safety (DPS) and the Center for Sustainability Education (CSE), among others. They discussed how to better respond to microaggressions and instances of bias and harassment on campus, and how to help support students dealing with these problems. The aim is to create a more inclusive community.

“The goal was to actually provide folks who do student support with an opportunity to think about [questions such as] ‘how do you create a campus that is inclusive,’ and ‘how does explicit attention to microaggressions and some of the challenges that students have…impact our work and how can we support [students] more effectively,’” says Vincent Stephens, director of the Popel Shaw Center for Race and Ethnicity.

Shin was brought to campus through a partnership between the Popel Shaw Center and the Wellness Center in order to shine a light on the importance of mental health in education, and how issues of social justice are directly tied to issues of mental health. For those interested in getting involved with these topics, Don’t Conceal to Heal and FRUIT are two clubs on campus that deal directly with issues of mental health and social justice, in addition to the Bias Education and Response Team (BERT), which provides support to individuals dealing with an incidence of bias or a hate crime.