The University of Connecticut is running a pop-up one-credit UNIV course titled “Feeling Well: The Science and Practice of Well Being” this Spring 2024 semester. The course, created this past fall semester, uses an interdisciplinary approach to help students understand the day-to-day components of happiness and well-being, as well as figure out broader questions of purpose and satisfaction throughout their lives. Survey results from the 600 students who completed it in the fall reveal an overwhelming approval of the course, with many specifically reporting a better ability to improve and regulate their mental state, according to UConn Today.
As mental health is one of the most pressing societal issues of the current day, The Daily Campus Editorial Board supports the intent behind this class to provide a free resource meant to help students develop skills to support themselves in the difficulties and often stressful nature of college life. However, as the Editorial Board has argued before in addressing other forms of societal issues, a one-credit UNIV course is not enough. By focusing on and heavily publicizing this new course, UConn attempts to enlarge the support for these issues and the course itself to an ingenuine point. A short, one-credit pass/fail course taken online consisting of multiple choice quizzes and impersonal videos cannot fully explain the complexities of the topics it deals with or properly ensure students engage with it in a meaningful enough way that will have an effect.
There is also the problem of what it focuses on, specifically the personal aspect of emotional well-being. It is crucial to recognize how the environmental factors surrounding a person are much more important in one’s mental health; in this sense, UConn is doing little to help its students by raising costs and further complicating the housing process for students. The result of these added stressors for students and families to deal with far outweighs the positives of one single course. It is not enough to place the onus on students but to ease the systemic factors that create the existential difficulties that underlie mental health issues.
UConn needs to adopt a more holistic approach toward student well-being in all areas of student life, not just through one course. The Editorial Board urges that UConn continue to provide more for students in addition to the resources, clinical and otherwise, that already exist. For students struggling with mental health problems, there are resources and people ready to help like, the cultural centers, SHaW individual and group therapy, the Let’s Talk program and even weekly pet therapy.