“We’re here for people to just come and hang out or if students want to come talk with another student, we’re here for them and we love to build community,” Bonner said. “We want every student who is in recovery, an ally or any student in general to feel like they have a place to go and to feel like they’re included on campus.”

Balloons popped, coins dropped and students stopped as the Counseling Center and a variety of other organizations created campus connections for Mental Health Awareness Day.

“It’s a really cool opportunity to be a support person and to be somebody that I would have wanted when I was going through my recovery journey,” Lufkin senior Luke Langston said.

In college, we kind of forget to take care of ourselves,” he said.
“Through this job, I get to learn about wellness topics, and that can be incorporated into my college life.”

On Monday, Baylor’s Rho Eta chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., hosted an open forum, “Let’s Get EmpoweRED,” highlighting and discussing women’s mental health, substance abuse and finding community at Baylor as a Black person. Attendees included DST members, Baylor staff, alumna and students.

“As students get to college, they all ask the question, ‘Who am I, who are my people and where do I belong?’” Jose Vallejo, assistant director for Collegiate Recovery said. “We tend to attach ourselves to certain groups and situations where we feel validated, accepted, loved and valued, and at times, those situations can involve substance misuse, especially in the college culture.”

The CARE Team is a group of professionals “who help connect students with solutions to challenges they face through resources both on and off campus.”

“It was first understood as our main defense against opioid overdose,” Nguyen said. “The issue is that for some time, the FDA had not granted the approval of over-the-counter, non-prescription use of Naloxone because I think the standards for treating opioid overdoses were still being developed.”

Instead of seeing this story fade out of the Baylor community’s minds over the next couple of days, we need to understand that this tragedy is also a time for us to remember that this could affect anyone.

In 2019 alone, the number of casualties opioid overdose accounted for was seven times higher than the number of U.S. military service members killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.