New CaPS Director Looks to the Data to Enhance Mental Health Care
By Katy Rank Lev
Shane Chaplin has always been fascinated by the work of John Snow. Not the ill-fated regal from Game of Thrones, but the “father of epidemiology” who systemically discovered the root cause of London’s 1853 cholera outbreak and, by closing down an infected water pump, saved the lives of countless people.
Chaplin, a psychologist, has a special interest in community health and the hidden ways each student’s experience can paint a picture of a larger challenge. He joined Carnegie Mellon University in the summer of 2019 as executive director of Counseling and Psychological Services (CaPS), a role that excites him as the university has made larger investments in student health, allowing him and his staff the bandwidth to explore.
The university has made larger investments in student health, allowing Chaplin and his staff the bandwidth to explore.
Early in his career, Chaplin attended a series of lectures with Isaac Prilleltensky, a community psychologist specializing in interdisciplinary approaches to community wellbeing. Prilleltensky, like Snow, was intrigued by data and making meaning from it. He told Chaplin of his experiences collecting data in hospital emergency departments, making note of how many visits were due to car crashes or dog bites. When Prilleltensky took these observations to local church and community leaders, they explained that someone had stolen the stop signs at dangerous intersections and a pack of feral dogs was roaming the streets. Phone calls to the department of transportation and animal control took care of these hazards, and ER visits went down.
Chaplin found this to be profound.
“What a remarkable change in perspective,” he said. “Information and data can do that!”
Since 2016, CMU has more than doubled the clinical staff at CaPS, and Chaplin said clinicians now have the capacity to design outreach programming to reach students with skill-building material in a wide array of topics.
“Treatment is treatment,” he said, noting that he is unlikely to see major breakthroughs in clinical approaches to student mental health. “Prevention and upstream intervention are the new focus of innovation in collegiate mental health care.”
Since Chaplin’s arrival at CMU, CaPS has begun to use a tool called The Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms (CCAPS). The digital screening device is available to students via easy-to-use electronic tablets — a simple change made possible by increased administrative resources at CaPS — and serves several purposes. The CCAPS screener, an evidence-based tool, not only helps the counseling center determine appropriate pathways of support for individual students, but together with demographic data may help researchers like Chaplin collect pieces of the mental health puzzle that can lead to preventative services before students require counseling.
“We at counseling centers are repositories of knowledge. We see so many people from our community. I want to look at the data and find patterns, find challenges specific to each school and each college.”
The tool allows CMU to participate in national studies using deidentified CCAPS data to compare with peer institution services and outcomes for students facing depression, anxiety or stress levels, among other concerns.
“We can start to utilize this data proactively to inform stakeholders on campus,” he said.
Chaplin wants to gather population data for how many students are coming from each school or major and at what point in their college careers.
At West Virginia University, his previous institution, Chaplin and his co-workers were able to identify, among other trends, that education majors tended to seek counseling in their third year of enrollment. When he took this information to the school of education, he learned this was when those students face their Praxis exam determining their placement for student teaching. In partnership with the education department, the counseling center developed a series of workshops teaching skills for test preparation, anxiety management and more, tailored for their junior students.
“We began to think of ways to help those students before they faced a crisis,” Chaplin said. “It’s a reach goal, but I want to do that here, too.”
Chaplin is thrilled by the interdisciplinary and collaborative ethos at CMU, where stakeholders are eager to come together and create opportunities to tackle student concerns before they become a problem.
“We at counseling centers are repositories of knowledge,” he said. “We see so many people from our community. I want to look at the data and find patterns, find challenges specific to each school and each college.”
Chaplin and the CaPS outreach team hope to then collaborate with those schools to design programs to help students, to build their skills and improve overall mental health and well-being. Chaplin is energized by the promise of integrating CCAPS and demographic data to design interventions at a systemic level, to create positive change for students at the university.
“I want to break the water pump,” Chaplin said of his plans to weave mental health education into academic curriculum. “I haven’t seen anyone else do this.”
At the helm of a center supporting over 35% of CMU’s student population, and with the ability to partner with the world’s best data scientists, he is well-positioned to make a splash.
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