THE GEORGETOWN VOICE
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Lighthouse connects volunteers with Georgetown students who could use a sympathetic ear. They talk about anything and everything, but neither party knows the other’s identity. Open conversation, which Project Lighthouse hopes to inspire, is a bridge between the culture Georgetown has now and the culture Syrimis is working toward—it lowers the barrier to frank conversation. “We’re all going through something unique,” Syrimis said. “If we wear our hearts on our sleeves, we can build such a strong community.” But Syrimis envisions a culture in which those sorts of conversations are completely normal and not subject to the stigma which makes Project Lighthouse’s anonymity necessary. Syrimis has found that Georgetown’s sense of community is vibrant yet superficial. “I have spent my time on this campus longing for those kinds of connections [that are meaningful],” she said. She has found one with her roommate. “If I’m crying in my living room, she will come down from the loft. If she hears me, she’ll come over to me and won’t even say, ‘What’s wrong?’ She’ll just sit next to me and wrap her arms around me.” Syrimis thinks helping others find their own genuine communities too has the power to improve Georgetown’s culture. “There is something so special about that that I feel like could make a community where we’re all striving to change the world and we’re all striving to make it better.” But for now, she says, Georgetown students don’t always use the resources available to them, like Project Lighthouse, Health Education Services, and chaplains. As a way to kickstart the conversations Syrimis envisions, Chick is bringing together two of the organizations with which she spends her time. The GUSA mental health policy team will partner with Project Lighthouse—for which Chick is the director of outreach—to gather stories from the Georgetown community to post anonymously around campus. Chick wrote that she hopes the program will let students “see that they are not alone in [their] struggles and that it is more common than we know.” Each of these leaders in Georgetown’s mental health landscape accepts that there is no single solution for, nor a single cause of, stress culture. But each leader believes that Georgetown must move in the same direction: toward improving students’ mentalities. When Emery summed up his approach to creating a culture conducive to mental health, he sounded like a dean invoking Ignatian spirituality in a convocation speech. “How do we … have college be an opportunity for education about how to live one’s entire life?”
Confidential Mental Health Resources National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-877-726-4727 Counseling and Psychiatric Services 202-687-6985 studenthealth.georgetown.edu/mental-health Project Lighthouse projectlighthousegu.com Egan Barnitt