MSU CAPS Summer Care Kit supports well-being in uncertain times

<p>“If someone Googles MSU CAPS, they might see an advertisement to buy a baseball cap,” Patishnock quips. “Actually it's what we're commonly known as. Counseling and Psychiatric Services is the primary mental health service for all MSU students. We are charged with being accessible and providing quality care to all 50,000 plus enrolled students. We have a bevy of resources, and we're here for students and faculty.”</p><p> </p><p>Patishnock and the CAPS team have created a Summer Care Kit for our growth and well-being.<br> <br> “It was in response to folks reaching out and asking for help in a variety of ways. “We've seen everybody struggle with trying to figure out how to manage in these unprecedented times. We first noticed signs of stress in our own staff. They were struggling with some of these transitions and we saw the same thing with our families at our homes and the students we're serving. The Summer Care Kit is five identified areas that we're finding to be fairly universal right now that all people could be benefiting from taking a look at and refocusing their energy. We chose these five areas as a way to create bite size snippets to focus on as opposed to a large document that would feel overwhelming. We broke it down to these five basic areas.”<br> <br> The five areas are the basics, maintaining connections with ourselves and others, coping skills, dealing with loss and uncertainty, and meaning and motivation.<br> <br> “In some ways you might look at our five areas and say, ‘Duh, that's not rocket science.’ But when things go awry and we're stressed, these are the first things that go out the window - our sleep, our exercise, and our nutrition. We tend not to think about those things and often we'll get dehydrated or we'll be malnourished, or we just won't be as active as we've been. Those things have a pretty immediate impact in all of our areas. And so just like when we're working with students who are coming in for depression or anxiety, if you show me a student who generally has a good sl