Publication date: Jun 23, 2026
Mental health screening platforms can be used to identify students in mental distress and can connect students to mental health services during disruptive events such as campus closures. We examined college students’ utilization of a mental health screening platform in the year before and after COVID-19-related campus closures. We analyzed 12 239 students across 31 US institutions who used the Interactive Screening Platform (ISP) in the 1 year before and after the COVID-19-related campus closure on March 15, 2020. We analyzed 3 outcomes: the monthly number of participants at each college, the proportion of participants who entered a dialogue with a mental health counselor, and the proportion of participants who sought a referral through the platform. To determine whether students sought a referral to mental health services, we used natural language processing methods to analyze messages between students and counselors. We used 2-sample t tests to test for differences in means and χ tests to determine differences in proportions, with P
| Concepts | Keywords |
|---|---|
| Campuses | COVID-19 pandemic |
| Counselors | mental health screening |
| Covid | natural language processing |
| March | |
| Monthly |
Semantics
| Type | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| disease | MESH | COVID-19 |