Healthy Vaqueros

Sources on campus to help students cope with the pandemic

Brigitte Ortiz | THE RIDER

The UTRGV Counseling Center offers several services to help students cope with their mental health issues during the pandemic. 

Maria Alejandra Mazariegos, a clinical therapist at the Counseling Center, said the department currently offers its services online.

“We currently are offering our individual therapy, we offer it via Telehealth, so through Zoom or Skype,” Mazariegos said. “We’re also offering online virtual groups on different topics.” 

The topics include self-love and dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), a general group providing UTRGV students the opportunity to learn new or build on existing ways of confronting life challenges. DBT skills have the capability of helping those who wish to improve their ability to regulate emotions, tolerate distress and negative emotion, be mindful and present in the given moment, and communicate and interact effectively with others, according to Andrew Perez, a UTRGV supervising clinical therapist.

 She said they will start a body positivity and expressive art group online as well. 

“We also offer virtual workshops on different topics,” Mazariegos said. “We’ve done some on stress management, on dealing with emotions during the pandemic, on how to access our services [and] on suicide prevention.” 

She said if students have a particular topic for a workshop and have 10 or more students interested, they can email the Counseling Center (counseling@utrgv.edu) and they can develop something for them.

The department also offers the Vaquero Crisis Line, a 24/7 confidential helpline for students going through an emotional crisis. 

“And we also have online self-help resources, such as an application called Thrive that is free for students,” Mazariegos said. “And that is an app that we’ve loaded resources on a lot of different topics related to mental health, so instead of Googling different websites or resources this is your one-stop shop.”

Staff and faculty can receive services through the UT Employee Assistance Program, and that would offer them free therapy.

Asked what sources or tips people can use to alleviate stress and/or anxiety, Mazariegos replied, “So the first one is really to create normalcy where you can. One thing we have control of is our daily schedules and our daily routine, so just because our typical quote-unquote normal life is now changing doesn’t mean we can’t create a different routine for us.” 

She suggests eating multiple meals a day, finding activities such as crafts, learning different skills or finding something that sparks happiness. 

Joseph Hovey, a professor in the Psychological Science Department and clinical psychologist, said another thing his department has looked at to cope with anxiety is optimism. 

“Being able to stay hopeful towards the future rather than hopeless, which would make sense given all the uncertainty that’s out there with COVID,” Hovey said.

He said to gather as much real data in regard to how to deal with COVID-19. 

“There is so much myths out there and misinformation,” Hovey said. “But sometimes having solid information will help cope and will help one kind of obsess less over how dangerous this is.”  

The UTRGV School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health & Biostatistics worked with several departments to design a COVID-19 Health and Wellbeing Survey that captured the impact of people’s depression and anxiety during the pandemic. 

Assistant Professor Candace Robledo said the department has received responses from 27 states and over 800 responses as of last Wednesday. 

“We’re really hoping to use it to add to the scientific literature about the impact that some of these policies that have been implemented during the pandemic have on families and members of the community so that next time around we can respond better or we can provide resources that are desperately needed by individuals to sort of cope during the situation,” Robledo said.  

She said they have launched a new survey in response to comments and feedback from the phase one survey. 

“We’ve actually collaborated with UT System to revamp the survey and ask some questions about how people have been able or unable to access health care services during this time,” Robledo said. 

To take the survey in English visit, https://j.mp/3hF90rt. For Spanish, visit https://j.mp/39ophxl.