A four-year, $10.4 million contract from the U.S. Department of Education was awarded to University of Wisconsin researchers in the Department of Educational Psychology Oct. 1 for the sake of launching a national mental health center to increase and diversify incoming mental health practitioners, according to a press release from the UW School of Education.

The award will help create the Mental Health Evaluation, Training, Research, and Innovation Center for Schools, which will be hosted in the Department of Educational Psychology at UW, according to the release. It will be a program to help train mental health professionals in schools to better serve their students.

School Mental Health Collaborative Co-director Katie Eklund, who helped author UW’s winning proposal, said METRICS will help train mental health professionals to help alleviate a shortage of mental health providers in schools across the country. Eklund said in 2018 there were 60 to 70 unfulfilled school psychologist positions in Wisconsin.

Representatives from other institutions, such as the University of Iowa, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Florida will serve as collaborators at METRICS, according to the release.

National Alliance on Mental Illness Wisconsin Director of State Policy and Advocacy Sita Diehl said the demand for mental health support, especially among younger generations, increased heavily during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the supply of practitioners has been unable to meet this demand.

“Finally people are recognizing that mental illness is real and treatable … and now they’re reaching out for help, just when we … hit this time where a lot of [practitioners] are retiring,” Diehl said.

School Mental Health Collaborative Co-director Stephen Kilgus and Eklund are professors within UW’s Department of Educational Psychology who wrote the proposal. Kilgus said the growing need for mental health support is at least partially linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. Within universities and in K-12 schools, this need has been difficult to meet.

Not only are mental health practitioners unable to meet the increasing call for support, there are a few groups who have even more limited access to mental health support, Eklund said.

“Children and families from minoritized backgrounds have especially severe disparities in access to care, often because of systemic barriers that they experience in our country,” Eklund said.

According to Diehl, race, ethnicity, identifying as LGBTQ+ and having disabilities such as deafness and blindness can limit peoples’ access to mental health support in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Kilgus said an estimated twenty percent of students K-12 are experiencing challenges in their mental health, but, only around fifty percent of this group is receiving support. In addition, he said this fifty percent is not evenly distributed, and those from minority backgrounds receive even less assistance on average.

Another great challenge for many individuals with mental health struggles, Diehl said, is receiving intervention early.

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According to Kilgus, the four-year contract is intended to resolve many of these issues. Most notably, he said, diversifying who provides mental health support will play a heavy role in ensuring students from different backgrounds feel comfortable receiving support.

Kilgus said students prefer and often benefit when their mental health practitioners share things in common with them. This could mean the mental health practitioners have had similar experiences to their patients, or have some form of shared identity.

By recruiting workers who are able to relate with students of different races, ethnicities and sexual identities, Eklund said, the shortages in mental health care provider workforce in K-12 schools and universities would be more directly addressed.

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Eklund said this contract will also help keep mental health practitioners in Wisconsin. Eklund said current graduate students who are receiving financial assistance from the grant are required to work at least three years in mental health support in a high-needs school. She said the hope of the contract is to keep these new mental health practitioners in Wisconsin after these three years in order to address provider shortages.

According to Kilgus, a heavy focus of the contract is not only directed towards educating a diverse group of professional psychologists, but also towards creating a working climate that encourages retention in the field. Kilgus said a lot of people leave the field every year, including within the first five years of their job. So, he’s trying to work with schools to allow mental health practitioners to stay where they are, and thrive while doing so.

Diehl, who is not directly involved in the contract and its operations, said more collaboration and diversity in the mental health field as encouraged by the contract would be a welcome step in improving the state of mental health in Wisconsin.

“I think that things will always get better over time … but things like this initiative will definitely help,” Diehl said.