Reposted by Liz Willen
As student mental health care needs overwhelm college counseling departments, universities create programs that prescribe nature, arts and belonging
hechingerreport.org
‘This is the first time I’ve touched grass’: Inside the U.S. colleges pioneering social prescriptions
This story is being published in partnership with MindSite News, a national news organization that reports on mental health and sends out a daily newsletter available here. In 1984, while studying at Cornell University as a graduate student and going through a “difficult” time, Don Rakow remembers escaping to the campus gardens. “They were my sanctuaries—those gardens were essential for me to maintain balance and to survive,” he says. Thirty years later, that moment came back to the English-major-turned-plant-science professor, when he began teaching at Cornell. As Rakow and fellow faculty members discussed what it would take to respond to the growing mental health crisis among students today, he suggested an unlikely candidate: their campus, and all of the natural wonders on it.
