From my experience of working with the current Office of the President’s Mental Health Commision, I’ve come to realize that mental health resources on our campus are highly uncoordinated in their advocacy efforts and severely understaffed and inaccessible. As President I want to push the administration to expand our mental health services on campus by hiring more counselors, in order to decrease wait times when scheduling appointments and increase consultation quality. Similarly, I also want to increase the capacity of the Reclaim Mental Health conference, currently the event only hosts around 200 people, my goal is to expand that to around 300-500 people so that more students can attend and learn about efforts of destigmatizing and normalizing mental health needs.

Next, one of the main projects I want to work on regarding mental health is streamlining the coordination of the different mental health efforts and resources on campus. This will be done through 2 prongs 1) By centralizing mental health resources on campus into one website, the link of which can be found in websites that are commonly frequented by students such as the UCI home website, UCSHIP website, and UCI Canvas. From a study done in 2020, 73% of students at UCI stated that they do not know where to find mental health resources on campus, this effort to centralize the resource as well as making it accessible on different websites will provide much needed accessibility.

Furthermore, I also want to streamline mental health advocacy efforts on campus. This will look like bringing back the Mental Health Coalition on campus, that will allow for the different mental health related RCOs and resources on campus to work collaboratively on advocacy efforts.

Outside of internal advocacy, I also plan on collaborating with ASUCI’s External Vice President office to author a Mental Health bill that can be lobbied to our local, state, and federal government. I hope that this piece of legislation will allow for the government to increase spending on these mental health resources so that more funding can be channeled into increasing the amount of counselors we have on campus as well as the quality of their counseling services.