Augustana College has launched Peer Recovery Support, a new student-led mental health support program that expands access to care while preparing students for careers in the growing mental health workforce.
Augustana’s research shows that colleges nationwide are facing rising demand for student mental health support, while many students remain hesitant to seek traditional counseling.
Peer Recovery Support expands access through confidential, one-on-one conversations grounded in shared experience, meeting with students earlier and outside traditional clinical pathways.
This comes at a time when many students seek help through informal resources such as social media and AI tools.
Each peer supporter (three female students so far) manages a small caseload and completes certified recovery support specialist training, preparing them for careers in the mental health field.
Morin Windle, of Aurora, Ill. -- a junior triple major in psychology, women, gender and sexuality studies, and creative writing -- is one of the peer supporters.
“A lot of people I work with struggle with isolation and social anxiety,” Windle said recently. “Watching them begin to trust me, build a relationship and then connect with others has been really rewarding.”
She said she’s had a history of battling things like anxiety, depression and panic disorder, and the program has helped her grow.
“I knew I had those experiences and I knew through therapy, through support, through family and friends, I was able to kind of overcome them and work through them up until this day,” Windle said. “I wanted that chance to give back to my community, particularly here at Augustana, because I've had just overall very positive experiences here and I guess I really wanted to do it.”
She’s planning to go into counseling as a career and wants to get solid experience working in a paid job.
“Having support is just one of the biggest things for people, especially for people who are feeling socially isolated or who are undergoing a significant mental health crisis,” Windle said.
“Even people who just maybe have like day-to-day interaction or they're just going through a rough patch in life. Having someone they can talk to, who is not a professional, who's not a professor, but as a student, it's really impactful for them because odds are we can be like ‘I understand this class is a nightmare to get through. I've had similar classes or I understand this relationship is trying you. Like, I've been in the same boat.’”
Bill Iavarone, Augie’s director of counseling services, said professional therapists are discouraged from sharing personal intimate details of their own lives.
“You really don't ever want to take the spotlight away from the client,” he said. “It’s probably easier to put yourself in their shoes and empathize and be compassionate with them, but you definitely don't want to overshare and be like, ‘20 years ago, I had a roommate that was just horrific, and I felt like I was leaving college. You really don't want to do that. You really want to keep the focus on their story. And so it's just part of the confidentiality and the boundaries of talking.”
For the peer recovery support students, their advantage is personal sharing, Windle said, since “it's a huge part of how we build connection with people. Literally, we are going through or we have gone through very, very similar experiences.”
Addi Wessel, a sophomore psychology/communications major from Sheffield, Ill., said that is the focus of their treatment in peer support.
“We are telling stories, and that's the thing that makes them feel more hopeful and they can get better,” she said.
The overall goal is to help increase the number of students seeking mental health support if needed. Currently, 14-16% of the Augie student body of 2,400 seeks out some counseling in a given year, Iavarone said.
“So hopefully, through peer recovery, we see that grow. And we can really use that as a measure, because you do see, unfortunately, with a lot of surveys, national surveys, the data that students do disproportionately experience mental health issues,” he said. “So I guarantee there's more than 16% of students that would benefit from counseling services.”
Inspired by other school programs
Iavarone kick-started the program, after getting funding from the federal government aimed at reducing sexual assault and violence on campus, and some of that went to support the students. The rest of it will be from Augustana’s office of the president, to help meet the goal of being a student-ready college, to counteract the sense of isolation at home.
Since COVID, the college has tried to change how it welcomed students, Iavarone said.
“The college has had to transform into being ready for those students. So making sure that the skills that we expected them to have, we're teaching them if they don't have it,” he said.
“That's the major part of the strategic plan that President Talentino has done over the last three or four years. And then this is kind of part of that as well, to make sure that students who have not had the chance to make connections with people and develop strong relationships have pattern trained individuals to help them with that and work through whatever they're going through.”
Augie modeled the new peer-recovery support program from Paul Priester, Northern Illinois University’s chair of the School of Interdisciplinary Health Professions, College of Health and Human Sciences.
“Illinois as a whole, after marijuana was legalized, a large percentage of the tax on marijuana is used for mental health support, and a large portion of that is used directly for peer support,” Iavarone said. “He has a grant from the state of Illinois for a large amount of money to do this as a community.
"And so he helped me get everything going. and we're starting with this, and it may stay this way of Augustana students helping Augustana students," he said. "But there is the potential to maybe even apply for that grant and have community members come in, train them, have them kind of ready to help not just the Augustana community, but other communities as well. So the Quad Cities as a whole. So I would say that he was a major help.”
That’s a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services that Augie doesn’t have yet.
“The impact that everybody's seeing from these three (students) is showing that it's a viable thing for our community, and then it's just making sure that they understand that it's viable for the Quad Cities,” Iavarone said. “Unfortunately, the Quad Cities suffers from mental health needs and substance abuse needs that peers can help with. Because really, peer support, the hardest thing about getting somebody treatment is their ability to seek out help. A lot of people resist help because you don't want to say that you're failing, which is totally understandable.
“So peer support is kind of reducing the barrier of help seeking behavior,” he added. “Instead of going to this trained professional that might be intimidating or you might have had a really bad experience with when you were a kid, why don't you talk to somebody who has lived experience with recovery and they'll talk to them. And they'll listen to them. And then hopefully listening through that story will get them to see how they can recover or get them to maybe say, okay, maybe it's not that hard to go to counseling.”
He trained each of the three peer support students as a certified recovery support specialist, including about 30 hours of group training and 10 hours of individual training. And then on top of that, the students learn about all college resources available to students on campus.
Connecting with students in a different way
Iavarone is the only full-time Augie employee in the counseling department, as a licensed clinical professional counselor, and there are two part-time clinical social workers. There are two unpaid interns, through the Western Illinois University counseling master’s program, and undergrads also have access to virtual counseling services through the college’s contract with Timely Care, he said.
Each of the three students offering counseling in the program are children of divorced parents, and struggled during high school.
Gwendolyn Lester, a first-year student from Chesterton, Ind. (outside Chicago), said it’s “important that I can share everything that I've learned with people and be in a very face-to-face, almost like service kind of job where I get to work with people and I get to see the growth,” she said. “I see growth even just in the hour meetings that I have with my clients, and then I see them the next week and the next week and I text them, I email them, I keep up with them, that kind of stuff. It's just a very rewarding job for me.”
Lester overcame her issues through therapy and medication treatment, and has blossomed so far at Augie, getting into the honors program.
“I became very confident and fulfilled here in all of the activities that I was doing and the ways that I was addressing my friendships and the people around me,” she said. She counsels three students weekly, which also has built Lester’s confidence, adding she hopes to work in special education.
“I did a lot of student teaching my senior year of high school, and I worked with a lot of different types of struggling students of all ages,” she said. “I was in a preschool with severely disabled students and then all the way up to behavioral units in high school. And it was just really impactful to see the way that my own lived experience and sharing that with them could kind of ground people. And that position just opened up here through peer support in college.”
“There's a sense of pride that I have in it that I kind of try to get across to my clients -- that this is really important for me and you are really important to me in a way that is different from a friendship,” Lester said. “And it goes beyond the money, because, quite frankly, if I wanted a job for money, I'd be working off campus, I'd be waitressing, I'd be doing something else.”
“I think consistency is really key. So making sure that even if my client is kind of uneasy, just gently pushing them to be like, ‘Hey, I'll see you next week',” she said. “Making sure that the consistency is really important in establishing that relationship of genuine care.”
Lester said the student counselors can be like a stepping stone, if a client wants more professional help.
“Some people feel uncomfortable going right to a professional because it's, like, scary. Whereas talking to a peer feels much more normal,” Wessel said. “And so, like, like Gwen said, peer support can kind of feel like a stepping stone to launch them into going into therapy.”
She also aspires to be a mental health clinician, and thought having this experience could be perfect.
Peer recovery support is an ideal parallel to the student-led Gray Matters Collective, a mental health program founded at Augustana which has over 100 students in their chapter, and many other chapters at high schools and colleges throughout the region, Iavarone said.
He is past board president for the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), and would see many GMC high school chapters.
“It's just really impressive that's happened for sure, to reach youth,” he said. “NAMI is a great program, but it struggles to reach youth. It focuses on evidence-based interventions and all these sort of things, which is very important. But Gray Matters just has that emphasis on youth.”
Iavarone would like to get more students doing peer recovery support.
“I think there's a lot of bravery in what they're doing just now and being one of these peer supporters,” he said. “I have a very small applicant pool and I don't want to just be like, I'll just take this because I know people can be helped from it. I think it's really important to find the right person. It really lives or dies by that. And thankfully I found three of the right people.”
Iavarone also has been impressed that this trio of women (who didn’t know each other before) have really bonded in the program.
“We’re just cool like that,” Lester joked.
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