University of Tennessee System leaders want to prioritize mental health care for students and faculty with the creation of the new chief wellness officer position.

Dr. Jessica “Jessi” Gold will oversee mental health and wellness resources and culture across the system when she steps into the role Feb. 1.

She plans to use 20 years of learning and experience to create a thriving mental health ecosystem at UT.

Gold, who will work out of Memphis’ UT Health Science Center, also will teach and serve clinical hours as a psychiatrist.

The youngest of four, Gold grew up in Florida and has master’s degree in anthropology with a focus in medical anthropology, an medical doctorate with a residency in adult psychiatry. She has worked for the World Health Organization and as the director of wellness, engagement and outreach at the Washington University School of Medicine.

This Q&A interview has been edited for length, grammar and clarity.

What can you tell us about this inaugural chief wellness officer role? What are your duties?

Gold: The fact that it exists is part of the really important part of it. It means that the university really is trying to think about mental health in a central, focused, systematic way. That does not happen very often, and it is really, really important.

We need to be making sure that everybody’s on the same page. So having a person in a role who can have a bird’s eye view of everything can say, “This school’s already been doing this really, really well. Why are we not doing that at this school? Or this school feels like they could benefit from this resource from this one. How can we make that more accessible?”

There’s resources committed to mental health and we’ll be able to build a team to work on this. I have a psychiatry background. Obviously, I know clinically what this looks like. But I also have a research background. I also have an education background. I also have an advocacy background.

A lot of times when people come into an administrative role, they don’t have clinical experience. They don’t really know what it’s been like to see someone in crisis, or to see someone who’s barely struggling and didn’t have to get in crisis. I’ve seen the whole spectrum of it. I know exactly what that looks like in someone, and how to think about this from the entire spectrum of mental health, because I’ve seen it. I’ve also been a person who’s had my own life experiences, too. I think for my own lived experiences from the patients that I see, I really have a unique perspective on that that not every administrator does.

What’s exciting you about the chief wellness officer role?

Gold: It’s challenging in the right ways. It’s the kind of thing where we can make a lot of difference for a lot of people across a huge population that’s very varied and very diverse and struggling with different things.

As a person who works in mental health and has worked on a one-on-one level but has also done mental health advocacy through the press in a bigger perspective, being able to directly have change across the state is really exciting for me. Also, to be a model of what this could be for other universities is exciting for me.

You’ll see some hospitals like Stanford or Mount Sinai have chief wellness officers, but it’s not as common in the undergraduate education space. I think we would be in the position to really make this a position that other people should be looking at and thinking about, and that other people should be saying, “That mental health thing that seems to not be going away, should be something we should all be thinking about, and should be central to our policies, to our decision making, to our educational programming.”

How will you serve faculty, staff and students across UT?

Gold: I’m hopefully going to spend good amounts of time on every campus to get to know the culture of the campus, to hear from students, to hear from faculty, to hear from staff, to hear from the people who work in well-being already.

(I want) to be a very transparent, open, supportive person. I hope to go to all of them multiple times across the first year to really get that ability. I hope to have a right-hand person with me at that time.

I think how the team expands will probably depend on what the needs are. If we say that it would be helpful to have someone who’s just focused on faculty, we might end up thinking that that’s needed. If we feel that the Health Science Center is a different population than the undergraduate campuses, we might want to at least make sure they have a specific person that has some time.

My charge upfront is really students. To me, that’s not to say that that won’t include faculty at all, because I’m a person who currently works in faculty and staff mental health and I’m aware of … how much there’s interplay between them. If a faculty member is not well, a student is going to be affected. And if a faculty member doesn’t feel competent in addressing student well-being, the student is not going to be supported.

As a chief wellness officer, I see my job as also being an advocate and supporter for the people who do this work. There are people across every campus whose job is in student affairs working in well-being, whose job is to be a therapist in a counseling center, whose job is to support the therapists. And that’s hard work.

It’s really important that those people (frontline workers, faculty, therapists) feel supported and advocated for and that their needs are also being met and that we’re retaining and supporting those people. Because if you go to a burned-out therapist, you’re not going to feel supported.

How do you plan to make students feel safe across the system on every campus?

Gold: Making people feel safe is not an easy thing. There are so many reasons why people feel unsafe, including their own personal histories, including their own cultural histories, including their own current histories. Being a psychiatrist helps for that. I’m very trained in that level of communication and that sort of level of understanding.

Part of it is trying to make a place where mental health is almost boring, because we talk about it so much, because it’s just another thing, because it’s not this huge thing to bring up, because struggling is normal, because challenges are normal, because imperfection is normal, because that’s life. And life is messy and complicated, and pretending otherwise is not helpful for anybody, especially 18-year-olds.

I’m hopeful that in modeling it, in encouraging it, in telling people what that looks like and giving them words for it that across the board from peer-to-peer, to faculty to supervisee, to faculty to student, that we come up with these ways where we feel comfortable within our own boundaries to have these conversations.

I think that we can get to a place where, within our own comfort zone, mental health becomes part of the conversation, or at least well-being and challenges.

I think we make people feel safe by knowing that we all are human, and that asking for help is not something to be ashamed of and it’s all part of the steps of humanity. And being a student, you need to ask for help …. I think we have to get to a place where students know that, and know that from people they look up to and respect.

What’s one thing about mental health that people don’t know, but should?

Gold: I think that when we say mental health, people always think we mean the people who show up in my office. That we mean diagnoses, like depression or anxiety.

But I think it’s important that people realize feelings are normal. That we don’t always have to pathologize (feelings), and that we need to get used to managing them and understanding them and labeling them and coping with them. But we don’t always have to go see someone like me for them.

We have to understand the spectrum of mental health a bit better. As we’ve gotten more comfortable talking about it, we focused kind of on one part, and we lost the narrative on the rest. I think it’s important that we realize that having feelings isn’t the problem. It’s all the rest of it. It’s when the feelings interfere with sleep and eating and functioning, and they’ve gone on for a really, really long time. That’s when you start to be worried.

Is there anything else people should know about you?

Gold: I think it’s important for people to know … that when I was in college, I had my own mental health struggles, and I still see a therapist regularly. I’ve been on medication since college — no changes — and I very much value taking care of my mental health as part of my own sort of complete well-being, and I don’t take that for granted.

When I was younger, I was told I was too healthy to get treated on campus, like my problems weren’t big enough or I didn’t sound sick enough. That was really dismissive and hurtful for a person who took a while to get help anyway.

I learned a lot from that about how to talk about these things and how to think about how hard it is to ask for help in the first place, and what it feels like to be dismissed in those situations.

I’ve never taken for granted my own well-being even though I’ve been pretty good since I was in college. I still talk to a therapist all the time, because I think it’s really critical to me doing my job well and being a person who does my job well for other people. My job can be hard sometimes, because I listen to some really hard stuff sometimes, and having an outlet can be really helpful.

I just want people to understand that coming in on this role, as important as it sounds, I’m also very much a human being who has learned from their own experiences, and who continues to learn from their own experiences and the experiences of my patients, friends and family. I will always do that.

Keenan Thomas is a higher education reporter. Email keenan.thomas@knoxnews.com. X, formerly known as Twitter @specialk2real.

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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: University Tennessee chief wellness officer prioritizes mental health