WCU Stories      March 13, 2025

By Shane Ryden

A new book from two Western Carolina University scholars investigates the existence and impact of mental illness stigma on university campuses.

“A University-Wide Approach to Changing Campus Cultures of Mental Illness Stigma” was co-edited by Kathleen Brennan, sociology professor and program director, and Kim Gorman, associate vice chancellor for health and wellness, and is set to be released May 2025.

In pairing practical examples with evidence-based solutions, Brennan and Gorman have produced a guide for university officials interested in promoting practical action to better their campus communities.

Brennan, operating from the silo of academic affairs, and Gorman, operating from the silo of student affairs, first collaborated on the topic in 2018. They asked whether WCU students were using the resources available to them and whether that assistance contributed to their academic wellbeing. Brennan and Gorman were keen to a broader lack of data on the overall impact of university counseling services.

“There wasn’t much out there in terms of whether or not students use CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Services) and more importantly how frequently they use it and its impact,” Brennan said.

“If you hold these stigmatized ideas about mental illness, it may prevent you from seeking help, and that’s tragic, because we know that help is available, and we want students to be able to utilize it if they need it,” Gorman said.

Gorman and Brennan’s original study collected data from roughly 1,000 WCU students, with 295 providing access to their counseling and academic data over multiple years. Their results prompted this latest investigation. 

“One of the interesting things that we found and continue to find is even though there’s this belief that stigma has decreased, and that’s what explains everybody going to counseling,” Gorman said. “We have found it has not decreased. There’s certain stigmas that are still very much present, and they do impact where students seek support.”

Their next question with these harmful, preconceived notions of mental illness confirmed as having an impact, was where is it coming from, and how is it proliferating? 

The scope of their research grew with the scale of the answer.

“There’s a variety of different types of stigma that are out there. Some relate to dangerousness, to [one]self and other people. Some relate to treatment-seeking. Some relate to exclusion and how socially distant [one] wants to be from a group based on any type of stigmatized identity,” Brennan said. 

The WCU researchers curate the work of 19 different professionals across the field of higher education, some working directly on campus and others engaged in advocacy. Together, their experiences and research findings paint a broader portrait of the current culture surrounding mental illness in academia and provide some potential solutions.

“Each individual campus has its own culture that it has to be aware of, and that awareness will lead to the decisions about what to do to address it,” Gorman said. “We really recommend that it’s not a one-semester project. It has to be something that is built into the fabric of the university in an ongoing fashion.”

While there is much work yet to be completed in this sphere of research, Gorman and Brennan’s work represents a valuable contribution to a burgeoning conversation.

“What we know about stigma is that it operates in silence, and if you give it that silence, it’s only going to grow. So having that structure in place, investment by all members or representatives of the community in which the university is set, is important,” Gorman said.