Last week was Health Week, hosted by the Student Health Advocacy Committee of the Student Union in collaboration with Brandeis Health Services. This program offered resources on healthy nutrition, exercise and stress management, as well as lectures on sexual assault and alcohol awareness, all of which are important topics for college students. This editorial board commends the effort to bring healthy habits to the student body. However, we encourage future Health Weeks to be refocused on a different set of student needs. While the topics of sleeping and having a healthy diet are significant, we feel that campus resources for emergency health situations could have also been addressed.

These resources are available through the various student health groups that often promote their services through mailbox advertisements and events. However, it is unclear which branches of the University administration explicitly handle the challenges of student mental and physical health. This is problematic for students who may not know where to turn to when they or someone they know encounters serious mental or physical health problems.

For students living off-campus, this process is even more opaque, as they are outside of the purview of a Community Development Coordinator or Community Adviser. These students are not as closely connected to University resources as other students are. The student support net is there, but less visible than it should be.

For that reason, this board encourages the creation of a Student Emergency Handbook, a fool-proof guide to University resources which are often touted during Orientation, but soon forgotten as students become upperclassmen. It would be modeled on the Faculty Emergency Guide, which was recently revised to provide quick information in case of an emergency. In the Student Emergency Handbook, situations, such as what to do if a friend or roommate is engaging in self-harm or has an eating disorder, would be followed by suggested courses of action, whether it relies on telling the CDC, talking to an Academic Adviser or talking to a student group such as STAR or x6TALK.

This guide could be fairly short, covering only the major possible issues students could face. Copies of it could be placed in student mailboxes and also posted online as an additional resource for students living off-campus. This board fully supports the idea of a University-wide Health Week, but would like to see a revision of its goals to focus on resources needed to maintain the physical and mental health of students.