The Texas Lawyer reports….One Texas law school, fully aware of students’ struggles, has been a trendsetter when it comes to taking care of law students’ mental health. Yet again, Texas Tech University School of Law’s most recent initiative is unique: It created a “wellness room” for students to decompress, de-stress, and rejuvenate for 30 minutes to one hour—no studying allowed.
Such an initiative is sorely needed in law schools, considering that 37 percent of law students screen positive for anxiety, said the 2014 Survey of Law Student Well-Being. Other Texas law schools have also implemented programs to help, yet The National Law Journalhas reported that Texas Tech’s program is particularly robust, including a student support and emergency team, an anonymous reporting system for students and faculty to flag problems, discussions about coping with stress from grades, and surveys to measure students’ feelings about their educational experience.
Texas Lawyer spoke with Gunnison Matula, president of Texas Tech’s Student Wellness Advisory Committee, about how students are digging the new wellness room. Here are his answers, edited for brevity and clarity.
I’m assuming you have used the wellness room yourself. Tell me all about the experience!
It’s located in our library in a room that used to be a professional office. We focused on making it look different from the school. You kind of leave the more functional brown and gray school-type atmosphere and go in, and it’s very nice. We have a light gray couch and a lot of light colors. We have lamps in there: it’s very soft, almost like a living room. It’s really calming, it’s quiet. We have a sound machine—you can turn on white noise or waves. You can separate yourself from the school environment, and it feels like you are home.
From what I understand, Texas Tech is the only Texas law school that has a wellness room like this. I’m interested to hear how this idea came to be. Will you tell me the story of creating it?
My 1L year—I’m a 3L now—we had an organization started by a student, the Student Wellness Advisory Council. The idea was to have students act as liaisons between the actual student population and the Office of Student Life and administration, to get an idea of what people are feeling about things, how we can improve, how we work on student wellness from a grassroots standpoint. One of the main problems we experienced is it was difficult to access the student health services on campus as a law student because we are separate from the main campus. We thought, ‘Let’s bring the therapy environment to the law school.’ The more we looked into it, we found out there is a lot of red tape when it comes to getting counselors to go somewhere. There is a lot of HIPPA stuff to consider. We thought if we can’t do this immediately, then let’s set up the room—instead of as a counseling room—let’s introduced it to students as a wellness room.
