#jack project

[justinchin]

People participate in the Jack Ride 2014 in Caledon, Ontario on Saturday, May 24, 2014. Around 500 cyclists of all backgrounds and experience levels ride along different routes of 50, 100 and 125 kilometres to fund raise for youth mental health hosted by the Jack Project.  

(Photos by Justin Chin for the Jack Project)

[thebriefingroom-blog]

When historian Daniel Woolf became principal of Queen's University two years ago, he never imagined he would have to make an emergency video one night from his home pleading for calm on a campus rocked by two student deaths within two weeks.

In all, six students would die on campus in a “horrible year and a half;” tragic signs of a wave of student stress and mental illness Woolf says is “off the charts” and gripping the Ivory Tower well beyond Queen’s.

In a panel Monday on mental health and higher learning hosted by Colleges Ontario, Woolf was one of several educators who warned mental illness on campus has become a question of life and death for which schools are scrambling to find answers. They are also grappling with a rising tide of stress and anxiety that makes it hard for many students to cope with the everyday challenges of a campus workload. “My gut instinct is there’s a fear of failure among students today, partly because they’re insecure about long-term job prospects, but also because they were never allowed to fail by so-called helicopter parents — this is a generation where everyone got a loot bag, no one came in last,” said Woolf — but at university, students can experience failure for the first time. But when serious mental illness strikes, the consequences can be fatal. Because of the rash of suicides and alcohol-related deaths on campus, mental health has become a priority at Queen’s. Woolf has made a powerful suicide-awareness video with the father of Jack Windeler, one of the Queen’s students who took his life. Woolf and Eric Windeler are working on a follow-up video to show students, through role-playing, how to ask someone if they’re feeling at risk... Read More