Abstract
Over the last years, the academic community has shown a mental health crisis scenario in undergraduate and graduate students (Auerbach et al., 2018; Evans et al., 2018). As the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) evolves around the world, the problem can be aggravated by the need for social isolation, especially in those students in late-adolescence, when peer interaction is a vital aspect of development (Orben et al., 2020). As highlighted by Grubic et al. (2020), new evidence is urgently necessary to inform student-centered support programs and strategies to address this crisis.
Preliminary studies show that peer support online interventions seem to provide a protective effect against symptoms of anxiety, stress, and psychological distress related to trauma in frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic (Cheng et al., 2020; Viswanathan et al., 2020). In the context of university students, an online peer support platform initiative developed in Iran showed that 71% of students in the early years reported some improvement in stress arising from the pandemic (Kazerooni et al., 2020). In a systematic review with meta-analysis (Huang et al., 2018), peer support interventions showed the highest effect size for depression and generalized anxiety disorder among college students when compared to other community interventions. Thus, peer-based interventions appear to be promising as a tool amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
On this matter, we developed the ‘Pega Leve’ (PL) program at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. It is a gatekeeper training program among peers of college students that can be conducted online, being composed of 8 hours of theoretical-practical activities divided into four modules: (1) understanding the university environment; (2) how to identify signs of emotional distress or risky behavior in peers; (3) how to empathetically communicate with someone in distress; and (4) emotional self-regulation skills and how to refer to mental health services properly (Arenas et al., 2019). Forty-two undergraduate and graduate students have already been trained by PL and more than 800 members of the academic community have participated in psychoeducational activities promoted by the program, in addition to the significant presence of PL on social media (https://www.ufrgs.br/pegaleve/).
The ubiquitous presence of social media is a strong alternative to address the problem of reduced contact with support networks and decreased help-seeking behavior. Online social influence has a significant impact on youths’ behavior. Concerning students’ mental health and online support, the impact can be more effective when peers (e.g., gatekeepers) start the conversation (Andrews et al., 2020). Besides being able to start the conversation, gatekeepers must be able to early identify and deal with mental health issues, understanding and stratifying risks in order to refer to proper assistance, preventing emergency mental health care when unnecessary. It is important, for example, to encourage students to take part in peer support programs when appropriate. We believe that initiatives like the PL are built from one of the most powerful tools we have as humans: the ability to connect and support each other.
