Universities and colleges across the United States are finding that an ever-increasing number of students on their campuses are dealing with a variety of mental health issues, ranging from anxiety and depression to thoughts of suicide.

Recent studies and surveys indicate that nearly 45 percent of college students nationally report symptoms of depression, while almost 40 percent report experiencing anxiety.

Perhaps most concerning – up to 15 percent of college students have contemplated suicide. U.S. campuses report that approximately 1,100 students take their own lives each year, making suicide the second-leading cause of death among that demographic.

Western Carolina University is not immune from this growing mental health crisis. Thanks to a significant financial contribution from a WCU alumna, the university’s Counseling and Psychology Services Center now will be able to increase its evaluation and treatment of students struggling with depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.

Rebecca Schlosser, a 1973 graduate of WCU and former member of the university’s Board of Trustees, recently made a transformative gift to WCU that will enable the center to greatly enhance its services by expanding access, increasing outreach and strengthening its ability to support student well-being.

“For me personally, mental health awareness came to the forefront when my son began struggling with mental health issues in 2007 and 2008 during his junior and senior year in college,” said Schlosser, a resident of Greensboro.

That son, David Edmond Wesley Schlosser, died unexpectedly at the age of 25, just nine days after graduating from Elon University.

“Students need to feel comfortable receiving mental health services,” Schlosser said. “College campuses should prioritize destigmatizing mental health, offering accessible resources and creating a supportive environment. Many times, mental health issues begin in early adulthood, which falls right during the college years. Dealing with the demands of college can add increased anxiety.”

She and her late husband, Greensboro attorney and former Guilford County District Attorney Michael A. Schlosser, made gifts in 2016 to create the David E. W. Schlosser Endowed Scholarship Fund in their son’s memory to provide support for students with demonstrated financial need in WCU’s Brinson Honors College.

They also agreed that they wanted to do something more to provide much-needed resources to WCU to help the university in its efforts to provide services to students struggling with mental health issues, in part to help parents and other family members avoid the heartache that they endured with the loss of their son.

The Schlossers later updated their financial plans to include a commitment to create an endowment to support the work of WCU’s Counseling and Psychological Services Center, a commitment that was fulfilled earlier this year.

In recognition of the gift establishing a program endowment for the center often referred to as CAPS, the university’s Board of Trustees has approved the facility’s renaming to the Schlosser Family Center for Counseling and Psychological Services.

The Schlosser Family Center for Counseling and Psychological Services has a mission of empowering students to engage in and be successful in a range of academic, social and cultural endeavors through fostering psychological wellness. The center provides individual and group counseling to students on a short-term basis at no cost as well as emergency services when a student is experiencing a mental health crisis. It is located in Suite 225 in the Bird Building and reaches beyond its physical office by offering tele-mental health services and appointments at WCU’s Biltmore Park off-campus instructional site.

Over the past few years, the center has consistently offered more than 7,000 appointments to an average of approximately 1,100 individual students annually, said Kim Gorman, associate vice chancellor for health and wellness.

Despite those numbers, the center has not experienced a significant increase in student usage of its services, which is most likely related to a limit in the ability to serve a larger number of students given current staffing restraints, said Caroline Engler, CAPS director. But the center has seen significant increases over the last three years in the severity and complexity of mental health issues presented by student clients, Engler said.

“Our data is consistent with Center for Collegiate Mental Health data in that we continue to see a rise in reported experiences of history of trauma. Additionally, according to CCMH data, WCU students report more frequent and intense experiences with depression, anxiety, eating concerns and suicidal ideation as compared to the national average,” she said.

“Although our students report higher levels of acuity than the national average, our data also indicates that, with treatment, they report more significant declines in experiences of suicidal ideation and overall distress than the CCMH national averages,” Engler said.

An official naming ceremony for the Schlosser Family Center for Counseling and Psychological Services is scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 4. Fittingly, September is National Suicide Prevention Month.

“Renaming CAPS is more than just changing the name,” Rebecca Schlosser said. “I speak also on behalf of my late husband. It was our goal to provide this endowed funding to support WCU’s Counseling and Psychological Services and to help to destigmatize the challenges surrounding mental health. Our family wishes to help shine a bright light of hope along this very difficult pathway,” Rebecca Schlosser said.

“To the students at WCU, if you feel you need mental health support, I encourage you to seek services at the Schlosser Family Center for Counseling and Psychological Services,” she said. “You are not alone.”

The Schlosser contribution will enable the center to greatly increase the level of counseling and other psychological services it offers and improve and expand its training program so that additional providers will be able to more adequately address the growing need for mental health services at WCU.

Numerous factors are playing a role in the rise of mental health issues in the United States in recent years, said Engler.

“There is a trend that individuals who seek treatment at university counseling centers have been engaged in treatment prior to coming to college. This tells us that their distress levels are affecting individuals in middle and high schools,” she said.

The global COVID-19 pandemic is frequently cited as one primary source of the increase in mental health issues among young people, causing uncertainty and fear of the unknown, disrupting social connections and interrupting academic schedules, Engler said.

“However, the pandemic simply intersected with other ongoing social factors including the divisiveness we are seeing in our communities – and in our families. This is having an impact on our sense of community and belongingness, both factors that are essential for good mental health,” she said. “Furthermore, research shows the impact of social media has been problematic and contributing to mental health symptoms. Finally, there is much evidence of the impact of sleep disruption, often caused by excessive cell phone use and gaming, on mental health symptoms for teens.”

The additional services made possible by the Schlosser gift will help a larger number of students receive the mental health services they need to be able to stay enrolled in school and on track to graduate, said Gorman.

A 2023 research project conducted by Gorman and WCU colleague Kathleen Brennan, professor of sociology, found that students who seek help for their mental health issues are more likely to persist in their educational journey.

“We know that our services are helpful for retention of students as demonstrated by our recent study. The results indicate a higher number of counseling sessions was helpful in retention efforts for all students at the university,” Gorman said. “So, this gift is an investment in our students.”

Gorman and Brennan published the results of their study in a paper titled “More Sessions Make a Difference: University Counseling Centers and Student Retention” in the June 2023 edition of the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice.

“We just feel immense gratitude,” Gorman said. “This gift is an incredible acknowledgement of the importance of mental health services at WCU.”

Rebecca Schlosser earned her bachelor’s degree in education. While a student at WCU, she was a member of Delta Zeta sorority, spent four years as a majorette with the marching band, and was a member of both Kappa Delta Pi and Alpha Phi Sigma honor societies. The WCU chapter of Phi Delta Kappa named her Most Outstanding Female Student at WCU her senior year.

After completing her undergraduate studies, she taught at a private all-girls school in New York before returning to school at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, earning her master’s degree in education there in 1983. During her time at UNCG, she met her future husband and helped him start his law firm.

Mike Schlosser was a graduate of Virginia Military Institute and Wake Forest University School of Law. He died in February 2024, 10 years after he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and amyloidosis as a result of his exposure to Agent Orange as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Paratrooper Corps serving a tour in South Vietnam.

Rebecca Schlosser served on the WCU Board of Trustees from 2017 until 2023 and formerly served on the university’s Foundation Board of Directors and Board of Visitors. A member of the Madison Legacy and Cullowhee giving societies, she served on the steering committee for WCU’s previous “Lead the Way” comprehensive fundraising campaign. She is an involved member of the Triad alumni chapter and frequently hosts Triad-area events at her Greensboro home. The Schlossers have been annual donors to WCU since 1990.

The naming of the Schlosser Family Center for Counseling and Psychological Services comes as WCU is in the midst of the public phase of its “Fill the Western Sky” comprehensive fundraising campaign, an effort to raise a minimum of $100 million in philanthropic support for the university’s academic, student engagement and athletics programs.

For more information about the “Fill the Western Sky” campaign or to make a contribution, visit WesternSky.wcu.edu, call 828-227-7124 or email advancement@wcu.edu.

Faith in WCU student-athletes leads to fundraising challenge to Greek alumni

By Melanie Threlkeld McConnell

Randy White is a man of faith, and not just in God, but in Western Carolina University, his alma mater. So much so, he and his wife, Kim Hunter, are putting up a $30,000 gift challenge for the “Whee Are One” fund to support WCU’s student-athletes — as long as 600 of his fellow Greek alumni contribute to the campaign by Nov. 20, the gift challenge deadline. The “Whee Are One” campaign continues until next June.

Why the gift?

White, a financial adviser, believes in lifting people up to create not only stronger communities, but a better world. So, he’s putting his money where his mouth is by issuing the Catamount Club Greek Challenge to members of his former fraternity, Sigma Chi, and other WCU Panhellenic groups to help plug the financial gap caused by COVID-19. The Greek Challenge allows alumni members of WCU sororities and fraternities to band together to raise scholarship support for Catamount Athletics. Now in its seventh consecutive year, the Greek Challenge has raised more than $3.5 million toward student-athlete scholarships.

And it’s especially important this year. The WCU Athletics program anticipates losing more than $1 million in revenue during the 2020-2021 school year because of the pandemic. Money raised during the “Whee Are One” fund is intended to provide “immediate-use funds” for expenditures associated with the cost to compete, practice and train during the 2020-2021 academic year, said Ryan Jones, associate athletics director/development and ticketing.

White, a member of the Catamount Club, is all in. WCU athletics were important to him as a student — he never missed a football game — because they kept him connected to campus, they were fun and they were free. He’s now in a position, he said, with his own two children grown, where he can get more involved in supporting the university and its student-athletes.

“As I have done better in my career and life, I believe it’s really important to give back. I think it’s very important that we talk to and mentor these kids, said White, who earned a finance degree in 1989 and an MBA in 1991. “We want to make sure they’re successful in playing here, but we also want to make sure they’re educated, because we’re all going pro in something. We want to make sure that the 99.99 percent who don’t go pro in football, basketball or whatever the sport have an excellent education and they’re able to have a successful career and build a family. That’s very important to me.”

Through his participation in his church’s mission work, White said he has seen first-hand how people’s lives can be changed or “re-booted” by someone lending a hand. “I have seen some college athletes who don’t focus on their education, play four seasons and go home to live in poverty,” said White. “I don’t want that to happen with the kids who play sports at WCU. That’s why I’m really focused on this issue.”

White’s fondness for his fellow Catamounts goes back to his own college days when he transferred to WCU from the University of Alaska Fairbanks after his freshman year, following his roommate who had been recruited to play tennis for the university. White’s family had moved to Alaska from California when he was 2 years old so his father could secure work on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which, once built, would transport oil from one end of the state to the other. He grew up in Copper Center, a small village of 300 to 400 residents who primarily were Athabaskan Indians. By the time college rolled around, White was tired of the cold.

“I have lived in the South pretty much for the rest of my life, so I equate myself as more of a Southerner than anything else at this point,” said White, who owns homes in Santa Rosa, California, Las Vegas and Bristol, Tennessee, locations where he and his wife maintain business offices.

White said he thrived at WCU, working as a resident adviser on the first floor of the south wing of Leatherwood Dorm and becoming a founding member of the university’s Sigma Chi chapter. The university’s impact on him, he said, was “enormous.”