#jack project

(Photos by Justin Chin for the Jack Project)

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