Galloway, N.J. – As music filled the Campus Center Grand Hall, students gathered in front of the various tables lining the hallway on Tuesday, Oct. 15.

At first glance, nothing was out of the ordinary, as there’s always a fair with giveaways happening this time of year.

However, the tables carried more than the standard fare of free pens and stress balls – students walked away talking about different symptoms of over 20 types of mental health conditions, or with marker and pen ink all over their hands from writing some of their deepest and darkest secrets on an anonymous wall.

Some left with brochures full of mental health resources and a raffle ticket that they earned after visiting every table, while others walked with friends and giggled about the positive affirmations they came up with as they filled in a canvas full of others. 

This is no regular event — it’s the IMALIVE Mental Health Fair, an initiative that Brooke Zall-Crawford, director of Counseling and Psychological Services, thought would be a perfect way to expose Stockton students to the many different mental health resources available to them, both on and off campus. With help from the Karen Alton Mental Health Initiatives Fund, Zall-Crawford and her team of student volunteers hosted this fair in both Galloway and Atlantic City. 

Zall-Crawford hopes students will walk away with two things from the inaugural event.

“Number one, always, to get rid of the stigma around mental health,” she said. “Number two, to figure out who you can go to in times of crisis, and if you can be that person for somebody else.

“That’s the other part of this — teaching not only peer educators but other students some facts about suicide, depression and all of these things, so that if they know someone who’s struggling with that, they now know how to get them assistance. At the bare minimum, we’re giving them lots to see and learn about, and that hopefully translates into them getting help and knowing where we are.”

Students appreciated the fair and the resources that they walked away with.

“I’m glad that Stockton hosted something like this to sort of bring attention to all of the different resources that we have and the fact that people care about mental health. It’s nice to know that more than just you are going through a lot because it can be hard to tell when you just walk by people in the hallways,” said Arren Molter, a senior Criminal Justice major from South Brunswick.

“I just happened to be passing by and thought I would partake in it,” said Chance Brown, a Sustainability major from Pleasantville. He had just completed his tour of the fair and was on his way to pick up a raffle ticket. “I definitely think this is a good occasion for the community of Stockton to converse together and talk about mental health in an area where they feel safe, and I’m interested to see what they’ll be coming up with in the future.”

The founder of IMALIVE, H. Reese Butler II, is no stranger to mental health and suicide prevention. Butler is also the founder of the Kristin Brooks Hope Center, named after his late wife, and the national suicide prevention hotline, 1-800-SUICIDE, which has since been shortened to 988.

The hotline is nationally recognized and is usually the first resource listed in mental health materials, but that wasn’t always the case.

“When hotlines first began in the 1960s, the clinical community was divided, and the vast majority of them didn’t believe that volunteers could actually reduce someone’s anxiety or depression and that only professionals could do that,” Butler said. “To them, it was, at best, benign, but at worst, it caused suicide. This was the prevailing belief throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, so when I began 1-800-SUICIDE back in 1998, I was told that suicide was, legally speaking, not preventable.” 

According to Butler, it took working with the U.S. Congress and utilizing research from proponents such as David Lester, a Stockton distinguished professor emeritus of Psychology who has published over 100 books on suicide research, for it to be considered a successful avenue for suicide prevention.

With more than 15 years of hosting the IMALIVE Fair on over 250 different college campuses under his belt, Butler is still grateful for Lester and is excited to continue finding ways to collaborate with the higher education institution that housed and enabled his mentor’s research.

“David Lester was my hero: I read most of his papers and realized that he was on the right side of history. With his clinical research on crisis hotlines, I was able to get the clinical community to finally support my work,” Butler said.

– Story by Loukaia Taylor

– Photos by Susan Allen

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