On Oct. 1, the first DiversAbility Day brought several representatives from disability aid and advocacy organizations into a ballroom in the Tech Square Research Building (TSRB) to discuss challenges and successes that people with disabilities face across campus.

Organized by the 2018 Diversity and Inclusion Fellows, DiversAbility Day was arranged to coincide with the start of October, which is the National Disability Employment Awareness Month. The National Disability Employment Awareness Month was established in 1988 by an act of Congress in order to “embrace the talents and skills that individuals with disabilities bring,” according to an October 2014 White House press release.

The main course of the DiversAbility day was a panel of speakers representing the Excel Program at the Scheller College of Business, the Office of Disability Services (ODS), Tools for Life, the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies, and AMAC Accessibility Solutions. These organizations comprise some of the many active resources for students with disabilities on Tech.

Much of the panel discussion surrounded accessibility concerns across campus and complaints that stemmed from issues with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), whose legally mandated accommodations are often impeded by faulty door switches, elevators and walkways in need of repairs, or persons not being mindful in their actions.

This last human element is one of the largest obstacles to accessibility, especially with the recent rise of dockless electric scooters across campus.

“The Bird or Lime scooters are causing a huge accessibility issue for us,” said Rebecca Frost, the assistant director of ODS. “They’re just being left in the middle of pathways, at the bottom of staircases, left on sidewalks or left blocking the curb cut.”

“Tech’s accessibility issues are systemic, and issues that are found across the country,” Frost said. “They’re not specific to Tech.”

Issues with accessibility often stem not from malicious exclusion, but rather from a lack of awareness of how people with disabilities — physical or otherwise — might be affected.

Non-mobility-related disabilities require different accommodations, and are often less visible from a “cultural standpoint,” according to Frost.

Frost says she would like to see a disability-focused hackathon on campus in order to brainstorm ideas to improve accessibility.

“What I would love to see is the development of an employee resource group [for disabilities],” said Heather Dicks, career development advisor in Scheller College of Business and a key organizer of DiversAbility Day. “I’d love to see a training for disability awareness, as well.”   

Students should know that ODS “exists so that if you have a condition or an impairment that is affecting your ability to do school at the same level and rate as other people in your classes, that we are here for you to help provide resources,” Frost said.

Dicks is in the process of ensuring that DiversAbility Day is a recurring event. The Diversity and Inclusion Fellows program, of which she is a fellow, is having a poster session on Nov. 19 in the Klaus atrium. All interested parties are encouraged to attend.

From Feb. 15 to 17, the Scheller College of Business will host the Intercollegiate Mental Health Conference (IMHC), an event intended to improve how colleges across the United States address the mental health needs of their student bodies. Representatives from schools such as UGA, Emory, GSU, UNC and Stanford, among others,  have been invited to share best practices, to listen to keynote speakers and to network among each other in order to “develop solutions to relevant issues,” according to the IMHC website.

The Joint Allocations Committee (JAC) is contributing $60,000 worth of funding for the conference. The JAC, created by the Student Government Association (SGA) in the wake of the shooting death of Scout Schultz,  is in charge of determining how $1 million of funds will be used for the improvement of mental health and related services across campus. Half of the JAC’s funding is provided by the SGA, and half comes from a matching contribution from administration.

The IMHC is one of six grants that the JAC has approved thus far. Other grants include efforts such as the Georgia Tech Counseling Center service expansion and the installation of swing set on campus.

The IMHC is an effort of the Mental Health Student Coalition (MHSC), a group dedicated to improving mental health resources on Tech’s campus. The MHSC formed in 2013 following the publication of a white paper regarding student mental health and “Tech’s depressogenic environment” by a mental health action team of SGA, according to the IMHC website.    

The Mental Health Student Coalition (MHSC), has asked individual institutions to send at least seven attendees, three of whom would be “undergraduate students involved in mental health and student leadership” according to the IMHC website. The other four slots would be filled by graduate students and non-students, such as faculty mental health professionals.

“The question came: Why are we trying to come up with new programs and policies when they already exist at other schools, and perhaps they’ve existed for such a long time that there’s an extensive amount of qualitative and quantitative feedback on … their effectiveness? That’s the idea that led to the conference,” said Collin Spencer, third year BIO and the director of MHSC.  “It was just a logical progression of thought.”

According to the IMHC website, the goal of the conference will be to “gather the best practices on mental health from college campuses across the nation.”

The best practices gathered from the conference will be grouped into three factors — public resources, mental health policy and technology ­— that each impact six at-risk student groups:  LGBT, international, graduate, transfer, low-income and disabled students.

There will be four keynote speeches during the conference, as well as a number of breakout sessions where the attendees can discuss the questions at hand. There will also be opportunities for the schools to showcase the technologies that have enabled them to improve treatment of mental health on their campus.

“A big part of this conference  … is actually establishing those connections and then utilizing them,” Spencer said.   

The MHSC is working with outside sponsors to help the conference go smoothly. The National Alliance on Mental Illness and the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities have each provided a keynote speaker who will speak on different pertinent issues.

The conference has been constructed so that it will be easy to replicate in the future.

“[We have] had conversations with the administration, and it’s definitely something that they want to see happen again,” Spencer said. “We will have the entire process already set up by the time we have hosted the first time, so in the future all anyone  has to do is pick a different set of topics and do it again.”

The Georgia Tech Counseling Center (GTCC) is expanding the services it offers with the introduction of three new initiatives funded with $53,392 from the SGA’s Joint Allocations Committee (JAC).

“[The goal is to] expand the services we offer and make [them] more accessible to the campus,” said Mack Bowers, Ph.D., the interim director and associate director for Training at the GTCC. “We tried to find things that were cost effective and that would be widely used and widely available to the campus.”

With this expansion, it is now possible to reach counseling services from a broader range of methods and times. The new initiatives include an interactive self help app, an after-hours mental health services phone line, and the use of biofeedback techniques in counseling sessions.

The GTCC has purchased a campus wide subscription to the WellTrack mobile app, an application that helps users to regulate stress, anxiety and depression. It can be used in conjunction with individual or group therapy.

“[The WellTrack application has] research to back it up,” said Bowers. “There are a lot of colleges and universities that already use it, particularly local ones, [and they] have had a good experience with it.”

The application will aggregate some user data in order to gauge how effectively it is being used, so as to offer tips on how it could be used better.

Members of the Tech
community can use their Tech provided email address in order to register for the WellTrack service and gain full access to the application.

The after-hours mental health services phone line will be setup in partnership with ProtoCall, which is “the nation’s leading provider of third-party telephonic behavioral health services,” according to GTCC publications.

The new ProtoCall service will ensure that there is around the clock access to important aid for those in crisis. To reach the line, members of the Tech community can call the GTCC phone number at 404-894-2575 and select Option 1 to speak with an after-hours counselor.

Biofeedback, a therapeutic technique where vital signals such as heart rate or blood pressure are measured and shown to patients to help them to understand and control their body’s responses, is also being incorporated into individual or group therapies.

“[Biofeedback] helps facilitate and accelerate the learning,” said Dr. Andrew Smith, interim associate director for Clinical Services and group program coordinator of the GTCC, “We thought it would really resonate with our students, given the technology piece of it and the interactive piece of it.”

Biofeedback is practiced by institutions such as Mayo Clinic, and according to a study published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, it is a reputable practice that has demonstrated an ability to improve therapeutic outcomes in patients suffering from a range of ailments, including PTSD and depression.   

The funding for this expansion of services has been provided through the Joint Allocations Committee, a committee of SGA that was created to address mental health resources at Tech in the wake of the shooting death of Scout Schultz in Sept. 2017.

The JAC is in charge of apportioning $1 million, half given by SGA and the other half by the administration, to programs as they see fit.

Last spring, the GTCC applied for JAC funding this spring after SGA reached out to the center to see if they wanted to put forth bills for funding proposals. As Tech’s main mental health resource center, the GTCC has submitted some of the most impactful JAC bills, and SGA members worked with Dr. Bowers in writing the bills’ specific language.

“Dr. Bowers primarily worked with one member of the committee to get each proposal in the format for bill submission and to iron out some aspects of the proposal itself,” said Andrew Cox, president of Graduate Student Government.

The GTCC is not the only campus organization to have received funding for programs from the JAC.

Thus far the committee has approved five other apportionments of funds, including for the intercollegiate mental health conference that will be held in the spring of the coming year, and a set of swings to be installed on campus. The GTCC is also in the process of applying for more funds from the JAC for initiatives such as the use of weighted blankets in counseling.

“[Weighted blankets are] something that they use in the school system pretty widely and there’s a lot of research around [them].” said Bowers, “Whenever people feel agitated or upset, or overwhelmed, there’s something about covering them with a weighted blanket that calms them down.”

For all members of the campus community, Dr. Bowers advises interested students to download the WellTrack application and see whether it fits their needs.