Your mind matters.
Wittenberg thinks so too and that’s why Wittenberg Residence Life staff held an event in the CDR last Friday night to promote stress relief and mental health.
The RA’s teamed up with the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) branch here in Springfield and the Wittenberg Counseling Services to help students release a little stress.
“The objective is to educate students on mental health and what it means to destress yourself in a healthy way, while also meeting new people,” Abbey Herzog, a class of 2020 RA from Meyers Hall, said.
There were several stations around the CDR, including a “Pop Away Stress” station, where students could write stressful things on balloons and then pop them with pins. I have never popped a balloon on purpose before, and the act was incredibly cathartic.
There was a stress ball station and a station where you could win a huge mason jar of candy if you could correctly guess how much candy was in it, which corresponded with a statistic about mental health, such as the percentage of anxiety in college students nationwide.
Angela Dugger, executive director of NAMI, stressed the importance of events like these: “I hope that this event encourages people to talk about mental illness… whether diagnosed or not, to talk about how they feel and to know that they’re not alone if they ask for help.”
“The purpose of these night programs is to give students who don’t really like the party scene, to give them an alternative,” Herzog said.
It’s always encouraging to know that the campus provides many opportunities for an enjoyable Friday night.
