Marist alum pushes for mental health course in wake of tragedy

A Marist School alum is fighting for a mental health course to be required at the Metro Atlanta private school in the wake of a graduate’s tragic death on the University of Georgia campus in February.

UGA freshman Wyatt Banks, 19, died by suicide on Feb. 21 on campus. The tragedy rocked the college and the Marist community, and alum Jim Nash sees it as part of a larger crisis.

Nash, who graduated from Marist School in 2022, said he remembered as a student “when they read over the announcement the graduated students that had killed themselves.” When he saw the news on Feb. 21, Banks said his heart sank.

“It was one of those ‘oh no’ type of moments,” Nash said.

For Nash, it fits into the broader state of mental health in America. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, as of 2019, an estimated one in five adults experience mental illness every year, but men die by suicide at a rate four times higher than women.

The Anxiety and Depression Association of America said that while nearly one in 10 men experience depression or anxiety, less than half seek treatment. Nash said suicidal men have a “much higher threshold for reaching out than women” due to stigma and difficulty asking for help.

The data spurred Nash to do something. He didn’t want people to say “it is what it is” and accept it as reality.

“It’s not just enough to be aware; we need to be proactive on it,” Nash said.

So he drafted a Change.org petition calling for the creation of a mental health course at Marist the last trimester before graduation. He named it SLAM, or Success in Life After Marist: A course to “provide the closest time frame between the instruction of the information in the class and the student’s transition to college.”

In the petition, which Nash started to gain community support for, SLAM is outlined as a mandatory non-religious course taught by a licensed mental health expert. In his vision, the class would feature testimonials from friends, family members, teachers, faculty members and coaches of Marist graduates lost to suicide.

Nash wants the course to be mandatory to avoid the stigma and shame that comes with asking counselors and clergy members for mental health help. He said the situation is like needing academic assistance — not everybody is going to get a tutor.

“That’s not necessarily to fault the student, I think that’s just kind of to say the way some people struggle reaching out and when you put something into the curriculum it’s there and it’s not an embarrassing step,” Nash said.

Keeping the course in the last trimester also focuses on the difficult transition from high school to college. As a private school from grades 7 to 12, Marist has about 1,100 students. That averages to about 200 students per grade, which Nash said creates a tight-knit community.

It also makes the transition to college that much more difficult. According to a 2022 study published by Gallup and student organization the Lumina Foundation, two out of five undergraduate students frequently experience emotional stress while attending college.

“A lot of people in Marist call our community, in a way, kind of a bubble,” Nash said.

He said it’s a “completely different ecosystem” to go from around 200 people who know everything about each other to colleges like the University of Georgia, with over 37,000 students.

Still, Nash acknowledged that he’s not a mental health expert. He said SLAM is a “blueprint” or outline for what the course could look like. It’s also a supplement to the existing Marist curriculum, not a replacement.

“I think this is a step in the right direction, but the thing is, we need to also make sure we don’t discount that Marist has done something because they really do care,” Nash said. “The people that run that school do care about their kid, and that’s been proven by the outreach in the faculty and staff.”

In 2022, the Marist School formed a Student Mental Health Task Force to study available data on national trends to gather information needed to support students. The school also hired a fifth counselor focusing on 7th and 8th-grade students. It also runs week-long campus kindness events, an “active minds club,” an advisory program, a text counseling program, a parent speaker series, a substance abuse prevention program, and a collection of educational literature on mental illness.

After publishing the petition on change.org, Nash said it was a “sigh of relief” to see the outpouring of community support. He gained 3,336 signatures of the 5,000 needed since starting it on Feb. 27.

While representatives from the Marist School declined to comment, Dozens of people provided reasons for signing the petition.

“Students, particularly middle and high need to be taught mental wellness skill proactively, they need to know these conversations are safe to have, they need to know that being vulnerable is displaying strength not weakness,” Marist graduate and school counselor Alex Taylor said. “This was not the environment that I experienced at Marist, and there are many variables that contributed to this.”

Others shared memories of the Marist community as well as hopes for more mental health resources in the future.

Nash said it’s like being able to breathe that so many other people see there’s a problem.” With public support, he hopes to continue the conversation with Marist leadership and feels they are “down to discuss what we could possibly work toward.”

Most of all, Nash wants to keep the tragedy from ever happening again.

“It is our moral obligation, to those students, to our kids, to our friends, to every single person that has taught that we have in our like, our web of life that we do everything in our power to protect them and that’s not just making sure that they’re not, you know, like having a cold or not,” Nash said. “You’ve got to make sure they’re right upstairs.”