Matilda Nickell ’20 S+MH Board Election Candidate Statement

Stanford + Mental Health’s mission is “to improve mental health at Stanford by driving systemic and cultural change on campus through education and direct action.” What does this mean to you and what do you hope to achieve by year’s end through your leadership of the S+MH Board/Organization? *

My hope would be to start changing Stanford’s culture around how we speak of our problems or times when we are struggling. I think there is acknowledgement, as in people will say they are stressed or are having a bad day, but we don’t dig deeper. There is not really a community of reaching out or asking people if they are really okay. My hope would be to give people the tools to know how and when they should reach out to others.

What is one idea for a project that you have for next year? What makes it uniquely fit to Stanford + Mental Health as a student organization and in terms of our mission, advisors, resources etc? *

I think one of the large problems with mental health is the stigma surrounding mental illness. I would like to create a video of Stanford students speaking of what mental health means to them, maybe some who had a mental illness while at Stanford, and how the dealt or didn’t deal with it.

Community engagement is a key to the success of projects in mental health. What is the community that your project serves and/or affects? And how do you engage with them to incorporate their needs into your project? *

My project would hope to engage the Stanford community as a whole. I think it would be easy to find people to open up and speak about mental health and mental illness. However, it would be difficult to get people to watch the video. One solution to this would be to ask RA’s to screen it in the dorms or host conversations with their students.

There are many different entities and organizations at Stanford working on Mental Health including school administrators, other CAPS/Vaden, mental health groups, etc. Furthermore, there are people and organizations working on mental health outside Stanford. How do you work with these organizations? What pitfalls do we have to consider in doing so? And how do we not reduplicate the efforts of others while focusing our efforts on what we can accomplish effectively? *

There is so much overlap of people trying to do the same things on campus when it comes to mental health. As I part of the mental health coalition I see these overlap and also what is lacking. I think an important part of Stanford + MH going forward is to find where it fits in the overall Mental Health Stanford community. I also think collaboration is key. For example, there is a group on campus of mental health outreach that leads panels on mental health. If the video were to be made I would reach out to them first and see if they would like to collaborate with Stanford + MH, as the video would be something they already do in a diffrent platform. I think it is also important to recognize all the tools and information there is online. Most of the time you don’t have to create new information, just re-purpose it . In the case of the video Headspace has campaigns that do exactly what I want to do and which we could model the video off of.

How do you support a culture of support and mental wellness within S+MH? What is your role in this and what actions can you take to support this. *

I am always open to talk about anything. I am also a Bridge counselor and love to help people in any way I can.