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Objective: This study aimed to examine college students' perceived mental health and help-seeking behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to determine the roles of campus mental health climate and institutional support on students' help-seeking behaviors and well-being. Participants: The sample included 123 students from a Northeastern United States University. Methods: Using a web-based survey and convenience sampling, data were collected in late 2021. Results: Most participants retrospectively reported a perceived decline in their mental health during the pandemic. Sixty-five percent of the participants reported that they did not receive professional help at a time when they needed it. Both campus mental health climate and institutional support were negatively related to anxiety symptoms. Greater institutional support predicted less social isolation. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the importance of campus climate and support on students' well-being during the pandemic and the need for increasing students' access to mental health care.

A caring and compassionate attitude toward the self (i.e., self-compassion) has been linked to various mental and physical health benefits. The Self-Compassion Scale (SCS) is widely used in psychology literature in order to assess global self-compassion. However, recent evidence suggests that the single factor model comprising positive and negative items of the SCS in fact measures two distinct constructs (i.e., self-criticism/self-coldness and self-compassion) with different psychological correlates. Given these recent findings, in addition to other research that highlights cultural differences in self-conceptualizations and self-evaluations, the present study examined potential ethnic differences in the relationships between self-criticism, self-compassion, and perceived health. Participants included 728 college students (141 Asian American, 449 European American, and 138 Hispanic/Latinx individuals) attending a university in the northeast United States. Results indicated that the relationship between self-criticism and self-compassion was significantly different across ethnicity. In addition, the relationships between these two constructs (i.e., self-criticism and self-compassion) and perceived health were moderated by ethnicity. Our findings suggest that focusing on global self-compassion scores (i.e., total SCS scores) may miss some of the important cultural or ethnic differences in the relationships between self-criticism, self-compassion, and perceived health.

The purpose of the present study was to propose and test two models to understand the relationship between perceived vulnerability to COVID-19 (PVC) and COVID-19-related traumatic stress (TS), as well as the variables that may mediate and moderate this relationship among individuals who have not yet been infected with COVID-19. Using an online survey, data were collected between late March and early April 2020. Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk and included 747 adults living in the United States. Supporting our hypotheses, results indicated that both COVID-19-related worries and social isolation were significant mediators of the relationship between PVC and TS (Model 1). In addition, the results of a moderated mediation analysis indicated that the indirect effect of PVC on TS through COVID-19-related worries was stronger for participants who reported greater social isolation (Model 2). Although future research is needed, these findings suggest that both social isolation and disease-related worries may be important variables that can be targeted in interventions to reduce pandemic-related TS., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)