Steve Marcus
Professor Daniel Bubb, faculty advisor of Project Wellness, Jose Llanes, president, and Lauren Morgan, vice president are interviewed at UNLV Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2024.
Sunday, Feb. 18, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Whenever Joe Llanes hears the whines of police sirens, the UNLV student can’t stop thinking back to the helpless feeling of sheltering in place while an active shooter was terrorizing campus.
The shooting Dec. 6 took the lives of three professors and critically injured a fourth inside Beam Hall, the same building in which Llanes sat in his organic chemistry class during the mayhem.
In the days after the shooting, Llanes said his body would begin trembling at the sound of emergency vehicles. He wasn’t alone.
Since last summer, Llanes, 20, has led UNLV’s peer-to-peer mental health group Project Wellness, which after the shooting received communication from several students looking for the on-campus resources his group was known to provide.
Project Wellness helped Llanes and many others through the anguish of surviving the mass shooting, he said. The program is gaining national attention.
“People would come up to me and they would go, ‘I can’t even see the building without, like, tearing up,’ or when the guy got killed on those stairs, they go, ‘Wow, I would walk up those stairs to my organic chemistry class every day,’ ” Llanes said. “The fact that I can go out of my way and go, I feel the same way, too; I would walk up those stairs, too; and everything is going to be OK. It’s so important to have people that stand up and that can be dealing with things, but also helping.”
The idea to enhance mental health resources on campus was realized in the fall of 2022 during a mental health town hall at the university that brought about 30 nonprofits in the wellness field to Las Vegas. The town hall showed the need, and student leaders went to work coordinating with the university.
By April of 2023, Project Wellness was born to serve as “a hub of all the resources on campus” relating to student wellness, Llanes said.
Llanes leads a team of six executive board members, three of whom also serve as committee chairs for their international and transfer student, mental health and fitness committees. The organization has gained over 700 members since its debut, said Daniel Bubb, a professor in the UNLV Honors College and adviser for the group.
The need for the group became apparent well before the December tragedy.
The group had a huge stack of fliers at the Rebel Ready back-to-school resource fair in the fall, said Lauren Morgan, Project Wellness vice president. The entire stack of fliers — including the extras — was gone by the end of the day.
Alpha Epsilon Delta’s Nevada Beta, UNLV’s pre-professional honors society chapter for students majoring in a health care field, were quick to jump in as well. Llanes said the group had about 60 students in one night asking how to get involved. There are no requirements for joining Project Wellness, and Morgan said students could be as involved as they wanted.
Although the executive board is trained in areas like suicide prevention, students are not licensed to diagnose others medically or give prescriptions.
UNLV already had a few different resources for the wellness of students and staff, according to the institution. There’s the Student Health Center, Counseling and Psychological Services, Faculty and Staff Treatment Center and even an on-campus pharmacy.
Bubb said the lack of a centralized place on campus for all these health resources may make it harder for students to know about, so it’s Project Wellness’ job to destigmatize mental health and promote the campus’s existing services. The group fills a void many other schools lack.
“Why do colleges and universities exist? We’re trying to work with students to intellectually challenge them — to develop their minds and expose them to different concepts, different ideas so that they can go out into the world and apply them,” said Bubb, who explained he had studied the prominence of mental health issues in students across the country and the lack of resources to support them. “And so, how can we effectively do that when we have a campus, or campuses, where students don’t feel comfortable learning because of some pervasive fear of mass shooting or some sort of violent incident.
“This country needs to have not only a very serious conversation about mental health, but we need to put the resources behind it — we are still woefully short of what we need,” he continued.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, students among all levels were showing signs of mental distress that has since worsened.
In a 2023 State of Higher Education report conducted by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, more students considered “stopping out” of their college program in 2022 than previous years. About 41% of the 6,008 students surveyed said it was “very difficult” or “difficult” to remain enrolled, with 36% of that figure being bachelor’s degree-seeking students and 44% students seeking an associate degree.
Hispanic, Black and male students were more likely to consider stopping their coursework than others, the study showed.
The top two reasons for students to leave college? Emotional stress or personal mental health reasons, the report found.
Over half of the study respondents who considered “stopping out” reported emotional stress as the reason they considered leaving.
Just last spring, the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment — a nationally recognized student health survey — found that over half of the 78,024 respondents experienced “moderate psychological distress.” Women most often reported they’ve been moderately stressed, while transgender and gender nonconforming students said they frequently had “severe psychological distress.”
Emotional stress can be caused by many different factors, not limited to academics, Bubb said.
Students may also be living with issues in their home life and economic situation, or dealing with anxieties about their future, he explained.
And while many campuses across the country have mental health or counseling units, Bubb said they often lack support or funding to properly expand their services.
It’s why he wants to start a national conversation about students’ mental health, especially as more college kids deal with feelings of uncertainty, mental distress, economic instability and mass shootings.
Project Wellness will be doing just that when Bubb and some members of their executive board work with the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU) — UNLV’s institution accrediting agency — to see if this program is effective and can be created in other schools, he said.
Last semester while Bubb was helping with university accreditation, he met NWCCU President and CEO Sonny Ramaswamy, who discussed Project Wellness with Bubb and saw it as a “possible model” for similar organizations on other campuses.
The NWCCU will meet with Bubb and students such as Llanes in the next few months to discuss aspects of the program, and the group will travel to Seattle for the NWCCU’s national conference in November to present data on areas like student usage of the program.
Despite the program being less than a year old and its members still recovering from surviving the December shooting, the group’s leaders believe Project Wellness can become a catalyst for conversations on mental health at college campuses across the U.S.
“This isn’t just a UNLV thing … there’s how many other universities across the United States that are having the same issue?” Llanes said. “If mental health wasn’t a big problem, the NWCCU wouldn’t be like, ‘You need to go with us this November.’ This is great news for us, but if you think about it, there’s so many people that are struggling in silence.”