Buckeye Peer Access Line maintains normal hours despite campus shutdown

Gabriela Okhuysen
Thu, 16 Apr 2020 02:05:00 +0000
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Students facing COVID-19 related changes might need someone to talk to with whom they are not isolated during the stay-at-home order.

The Buckeye Peer Access Line — which is maintaining normal hours despite Ohio State’s lockdown — is an anonymous nonemergency talk line that allows students to engage in brief phone conversations with a fellow Buckeye who can offer support and information about campus resources, according to the Ohio State Student Wellness Center website. Based out of the wellness center, Buckeye PAL takes calls as a proactive measure to prevent high distress or emergency situations among students, Ivory Levert, Buckeye PAL program manager, said.

The number of callers has increased since Buckeye PAL launched in fall 2019, and is beginning to receive regular calls earlier in the semester. It began receiving regular calls three weeks into the 2020 spring semester as opposed to receiving regular calls in the second half of the fall semester, Levert said.

Co-founder and current student manager Emily Kearney, a fourth-year in neuroscience, said in an email that almost all of the calls received in the past week have been about stress related to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Kearney and fellow co-founder and student manager Carmen Greiner, a fourth-year in English, presented the PAL model to Ohio State’s Mental Health Task Force in summer 2018, following a semester when two Ohio State students fell from parking garages on campus, Kearney said.

“We got together like, ‘OK, what are we missing here?’” Kearney said. “Ohio State’s so great at so many different things, and so why can’t we seem to get this mental health thing right?”

?Keith Watson speaks over a Peer Access Line phone at a call desk in the Student Wellness Center. PCredit: Courtesy of Ivory Levert

When developing Buckeye PAL, Kearney and Greiner took inspiration from other universities’ text and call lines for students — especially those that were student-run — and implemented the peer-to-peer philosophy as a crucial aspect of the PAL, Kearney said.

“I know I would be more receptive to hearing from another Ohio State student as opposed to, like, a staff member or the emergency talk lines that are run by just random volunteers,” Kearney said. “For Ohio State, I think it’s important because we want to hear from other students who are going through the same thing, who are living on campus and are experiencing the same Ohio State.”

The talk line has recruited 29 student volunteers, who are called PALs, since its launch, Kearney said.

Each PAL must go through 40 hours of training before they can take phone calls, Kearney said. During this training, the volunteers run through mock call scenarios, active listening and motivational skill workshops, while learning how to connect students with departments and resources on campus such as Title IX, Counseling and Consultation Services and the Office of Institutional Equity.

“It really helped me understand the importance of: Not only am I hearing what they are saying; am I listening to what they’re saying?” Keith Watson, a third-year in public health and PAL, said. “When we went through the training, I noticed that I was not that great of an active listener, and I wasn’t aware of that, either.”

Through their training, PALs are also challenged with reflecting on their own mental health and wellness journeys as college students, allowing them to use their individual awareness to help others, Levert said.

“A lot of us don’t look like one another because we have different walks of life. So throughout the training, we had to learn who we were as people,” Watson said. “It made me realize that what I may think is important, or what privilege I may have or feel like I do not have, someone has the exact opposite.”

The line receives two to three calls per week, typically from students managing their academic stress, feeling homesick, having relationship issues, acclimating to campus as commuters and navigating personal and social identities, Levert said.

During each call, PALs aim to help the caller process what they are experiencing in order to offer the best advice and resources or help them plan out their next steps in overcoming or identifying an underlying stressor they are facing, Kearney said.

Despite the training and steady influx of calls, PALs are sometimes pressed with feeling like they haven’t done enough for their peers, either forgetting about potential resources or not getting to the root of the issue, Benjamin Chiappone, a third-year in psychology and Spanish and PAL volunteer, said.

Chiappone said he has struggled with separating and processing his own emotions from those of callers while trying to give his best, objective support.

“Sometimes it can almost be like an empathy overload because sometimes people might ask for your opinion or you might feel really, really close to a situation somebody is describing,” Chiappone said. “So kind of distancing yourself from giving that opinion can be a little overwhelming sometimes because you might just feel so much — I don’t want to say love — but having a strong emotion towards that person.”

Kearney said that in order to support the PALs with their own mental health, the whole team typically collaborates during phone calls or debriefs together after an emotionally overwhelming call.

Moving forward, the PALs are trying to create a greater visual presence for the talk line on campus through tabling events at residence halls, the Ohio Union and the RPAC and more social media engagement to promote the line and increase both their callers and volunteers, Kearney said.

Levert said she hopes more students will use Buckeye PAL.

“I think a lot of people kind of generally know about it and heard about it but don’t really understand what it is,” Levert said. “So a lot of the work that we’ve been trying to do has been around promoting the PAL line because any time I share with anybody, and I think Emily could say the same, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is a great resource.’”

The Buckeye Peer Access Line will continue to operate at regular hours during the pandemic. Students interested in speaking with a student volunteer can call 614-514-3333 Monday through Friday from 8 p.m. to midnight.

“Sometimes it can be normalized to keep these feelings inside,” Chiappone said. “It’s just important to know that on campus, there are people that you can talk to and won’t judge you.”