Gannon University’s Good for U initiative invites students, staff and faculty to look at continuing to promote wellness around campus. As we return from Thanksgiving break and look ahead to finals week, the reminder is to embrace your individual emotional wellness.
Emotional wellness is our ability to understand ourselves, express our emotions in an appropriate manner and adopt positive strategies to adapt to life’s challenges.
Maintaining optimism, taking personal responsibility, managing stress and adjusting to change are all part of Gannon’s initiative to be a happier and healthier you.
Gannon promotes these ideals in places such as the Health and Counseling Center, through student organizations and with activities throughout campus during the year.
The Health and Counseling Center (HCC), which is located underneath the Harborview Apartments, offers a variety of services. Whether you are sick, feeling under the weather or just need someone to talk to, this service is accessible to all Gannon students.
This service offers to fortify your emotional wellness and help you get back to where you need to be. Psychologists in the HCC offer free individual and group counseling services to all students.
For Gannon faculty and staff, the university’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP) offers confidential counseling services free of charge. There are also Relaxation Rooms located in the HCC that provide student, faculty and staff a place to fortify their emotional wellness through instructional sessions on progressive muscle relaxation, breathing techniques and guided visualization, allowing you to reflect and relax.
Gannon also offers other ways to embrace your emotional wellness, as there are many student-led organizations that do just that.
Active Minds is a student-led organization that is committed to removing the stigma associated with mental health and illnesses and improving the awareness on campus about those stigmas. Active Minds helps with the education of students in the area of mental health by providing flyers and resources to help increase their knowledge of mental health.
“We try to provide the students with enough information to educate them, and every year we send a couple of students to a mental health conference in D.C. to learn more about the issues with the stigma,” said Kasie Inserra, treasurer of Active Minds.
In addition to all of these services, once a month on Wednesdays there are therapy dogs located in Recreation and Wellness Center (RWC), which includes multiple breeds of dogs such as Labradors, a Great Dane and a cocker spaniel provided to the students by the volunteers from Therapy Dogs United.
As John Homer Miller once said, “Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you, as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.”
AMY BENKOVICH
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