The mental health crisis across the United States is widespread, and it shows no signs of abating, with one in five adults experiencing mental illness each year. Among college students, the situation is even more pressing: approximately 60 percent of college students struggle with at least one mental health challenge. The Hope Center recently found that 44 percent of students reported experiencing clinical depression and/or anxiety. Further, 57 percent of students who stopped out without completing a credential before subsequently re-enrolling reported that they left college due to mental health issues. Around 50 percent of college students lack access to mental health care, while the majority of campus counseling centers are working at or over capacity–struggling to meet the high demand of student mental health needs due to limited resources, a shortage of mental health professionals, and budget cuts.

Despite these challenges, institutions continue to search for unique ways to support students’ well-being and mental health by implementing peer-to-peer support models, offering meditation and mindfulness spaces, and organizing mental health events such as fairs, vigils or awareness campaigns. Ithaka S+R’s early research indicates that academic and public libraries could play a meaningful role in supporting student well-being by connecting student communities to vital information about mental health resources and services.

The first phase of the Maximizing Public-Academic Library Partnerships project, funded by ECMC Foundation, explored how community college and public libraries currently promote basic needs resources and services on their websites, including what kinds of mental health information they provide. Through a comprehensive inventory analysis of library websites, we found that while public libraries prioritize connecting patrons and communities to mental health information and resources, such as social workers and crisis support, more robustly than community college libraries, they both provide vital mental health information on their websites.

Below we share a few exemplary cases of community college and public libraries offering comprehensive mental health information and support. These examples reflect the ways in which partnerships between academic and public libraries, as well as collaborations between university or college campuses and public libraries, fuel the capacity to enhance community mental health and well-being.

Exemplary Libraries Promoting Mental Health Resources and Services

Overall, our findings indicated that 38 percent of community college libraries in our sample provided mental health information on their website, with a tendency to focus on sharing mental health information sources (e.g., mental health book displays, quick links), crisis resources (e.g., 988, The Trevor Project, The Steve Fund), and self-care materials (e.g., self-help and well-being guides, stress relief guides). In comparison, 65 percent of public libraries primarily offered resources on depression and general mental health information, as well as offered mental health workshops and programs, such as regular mindfulness and meditation classes, gardening therapy classes, and yoga for all ages. Both library types offer counseling referrals or provide information about local counseling services.

We uncovered a few cases where both types of libraries shared robust mental health information on their websites, promoting a wide spectrum of mental health resources and services. Today, we highlight a few standout websites from community college libraries and public libraries where we found well-developed, detailed information on programming, resources, and services that support the mental health needs of each library’s community.

Community College Libraries

Academic libraries play a vital role in connecting students to mental health information, with our inventory analysis finding that they provide essential campus and community guides. For example, through their research guides, Lake Michigan College provides mental health information, which includes counseling referrals for on and off campus counseling services, while Eastern Arizona College offers crisis hotline information and peer support warm lines.

Consider Honolulu Community College’s (HCC) exemplary Mental Health Resources guide hosted on the library website, which offers a one-stop-shop for mental health resources both on and off campus. From the guide’s homepage—Mental Health 101—students can immediately access information for the national crisis hotline, as well as the local crisis hotline, Neighbor Islands. The homepage also shares self-care tips and ideas, as well as what to do when life between school and home begins to feel too overwhelming. The guide includes a Library Resources tab, which covers the topic of mental health as it pertains to research—mental health key definitions, e-books, physical books—and other tabs direct students to campus and community resources.

Under the Campus Resources tab, students will find phone numbers for the campus wellness center, the campus health center, and the LGBTQ+ Center located at the University of Hawaiʻi-Manoa. On this page, students can learn about what kinds of counseling services are available on campus (e.g., short-term, long-term, crisis, etc.), as well as student lounge spaces, disability services, and technology and printing services. The Community Resources tab connects students to a comprehensive list of counseling resources and services, ranging from in-person to telehealth counseling, outpatient services, and several medical and counseling centers and programs in the area.

The HCC library also hosts a research guide on domestic violence. While the domestic violence  search guide primarily focuses on research and statistics, it does provide information about relevant local resources and services. Lastly, the library’s guide on The Homeless in Hawaiʻi provides information about local resources and services that serve individuals, children, and families experiencing housing insecurity with mental illness, including Kokua Safe Haven and Parents and Children Together.

Public Libraries

Whereas community college libraries utilize research guides to share mental health information, public libraries usually provide similar kinds of  information via “Community Resources” tabs, as well as through their events calendar. For instance, the Indianapolis Public Library (IPL) combines programs and events in one tab or link. Further, the IPL’s on-site social work services program provides social workers to the community as a resource for mental health assistance. Similarly, the Davenport Public Library in eastern Iowa has a social worker on staff as a resource to the community, offering individualized and personalized care.

Also consider the Denver Public Library’s easy-to-access mental health information. With a brief scroll to the bottom of the homepage, users and patrons can locate a Health and Wellness link, which immediately takes a user to a pre-filtered version of the library’s Calendar of Events, specifically featuring holistic well-being and mental health programs. A patron can attend guided meditation, mindfulness hours, self-care programming for teens, grief support, and much more.

Beyond the DPL’s Calendar of Events, the library website also hosts a Discover Local Resources tab in the middle of the homepage, and the list of resources by topic includes links to crisis hotlines and referrals, the Colorado chapter of the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), recovery/substance clinics, local behavioral health clinics, mental health counseling services (including local mental health resource centers and community health centers), and affordable counseling services. In addition to these localized mental health resources and services, a Community Assistance Resources tab at the bottom of the homepage spells out a range of even more resources and services, such as information on relationship and domestic violence and how to get insurance coverage in Colorado.

DPL’s approach is unique in providing two mental health resources and information tabs across their webpage, rather than one, which ensures that patrons can easily discover and access information and resources. Moreover, the DPL’s Calendar of Events is searchable by not only age/group but also program type (e.g., health and wellness, arts and crafts, author visits, and more) rather than static, making it all the easier and more accessible to search.

Not only do both HCC and DPL advertise a full scope of mental health resources and services—both within the physical library space and the local community—they do so alongside other basic needs resources and services. For instance, the DPL’s Community Assistance Resources tab includes information about local shelters, food pantries, veteran resources, and resources for people who were formerly incarcerated. HCC’s guides on domestic violence and homelessness are two examples of how a student might find mental health information through resources that are not directly labeled as such but connect them to other basic needs information. Providing basic needs information alongside mental health resources ensures that the community can have better access to holistic support towards their overall well-being.

Because community college and public libraries serve similar patronage, there may very well be tangible benefits of a community college library partnering with its local library (and vice versa) to cross-share vital and potentially life changing information.

Because community college and public libraries serve similar patronage, there may very well be tangible benefits of a community college library partnering with its local library (and vice versa) to cross-share vital and potentially life changing information. While our inventory of basic needs support revealed only a limited number of formal partnerships between the two library types—suggesting that there is indeed room for expanding collaboration opportunities–these examples demonstrate many potential areas for academic-public library collaboration, specifically as it pertains to mental health support.

Existing Mental Health Initiatives Between Academic Institutions and Public Libraries

Our ongoing exploration of academic-public library partnerships and basic needs information-sharing shows that particularly at the four-year college level, a handful of partnerships already exist that promote and provide mental health initiatives across universities and public libraries. These collaborative initiatives offer valuable lessons and insights on how institutions and libraries can work together to support community mental health. Below, we briefly highlight three different kinds of academic institution-public library collaborations, with an emphasis on partnerships that address mental health training for librarians (and all library staff), teen or youth mental health, and the impact education and research have on a given community’s well-being.

  • The Healthy Library Initiative between the University of Pennsylvania and the Free Library of Philadelphia “harness[es] the power of public libraries to improve population health.” In working towards this goal, researchers from UPenn conduct research on the role of libraries in public health, in general, and training their staff to better respond to the community’s evolving needs, in particular. With respect to mental health, not only does this collaboration harness the power of social workers through needs assessments and training, but it also seeks to support homelessness, mental health, and more recently, the opioid crisis in tandem, highlighting the connective tissue between mental health and basic needs more broadly.
  • The Healthy Libraries Program between Stony Brook University’s Program in Public Health and faculty in the Schools of Nursing, Social Welfare, Health Professions, the Renaissance School of Medicine and the Health Sciences Library (referred to as the HeLP program) brings public health, including physical and mental health expertise into the library. Because it is not uncommon for librarians to manage mental health crises, the program has trained and supervised hundreds of students as part of interprofessional teams assisting librarians who support mental health. Patrons receive evidence-based health information, screening, and case management.
  • Northwestern University’s Institute for Public Health and Medicine partners with Oak Royal Public Library towards developing a digital mental health service aimed at teens. This collaboration is especially important given the current youth mental health crisis and the fact that suicide is the third leading cause of death in young people (ages 10 to 14). The digital app aims to specifically help teens with anxiety, as well as using the physical space of the library as a well-being tool for teen community building with their peers.

The programs and libraries highlighted here are only a fraction of the great work libraries are undertaking towards supporting patron mental health, though there are noteworthy opportunities for growth in developing collaborative support around mental health needs between both academic and public libraries. These collaborations show us that library partnerships—whether they are between academic and public libraries or between a college or university and their local library—contribute to a community’s well-being by leveraging external partnerships, expanding programming and training, and improving the accessibility of mental health information that connects patrons to the resources and services that are available to them.

We will be continuing to track mental health in both academic and public libraries, especially formal and informal academic-public library partnerships that support community mental health, and if your library is doing work in this area we would love to hear from you. If you’d like to be in touch, please reach out to Sage Jasper Love (sage.love@ithaka.org).