Pacific University Earns National Recognition for Innovative Mental Health Support

to Pacific University, the question on its campus has become less about whether students are struggling and more about designing a space where struggling is met, in real time, with care; that philosophy, the school notes, has earned it a place among 38 institutions receiving Insight Into Academia's 2026 Excellence in Mental Health and Well-Being Award.

A campus built around the nervous system

What sets Pacific apart, by the university's own account, is not a single program but a woven structure of small, intentional interventions. Last spring the school opened sensory rooms in both its Forest Grove and Hillsboro campus libraries; the spaces were designed as a capstone project by a graduate student in occupational therapy, drawing on her own experiences and those of fellow neurodivergent peers. They offer a regulated, quiet place for students to settle themselves when anxiety rises, a kind of architectural acknowledgement that cognition is not always linear, and that the body often needs to come before the mind can return.

Pacific is also in its second year of the College Autism Network's Autism-Inclusive Campus Designation Pilot, one of just seven institutions nationwide participating. The pilot opens an ongoing conversation about how the university can better meet the needs of autistic and neurodivergent students, with mental health supports threaded throughout rather than tucked into a corner of campus life.

Infrastructure as a form of empathy

Beyond these visible rooms sits a quieter layer of architecture. A care referral system allows anyone in the community, students, faculty, or staff, to flag a concern; the program reviews over 1,000 referrals annually and coordinates responses across academic, medical, family, and basic-needs support. A "Support at Pacific" page sits one click away from every page on the university's website, an effort to make help discoverable rather than earned through persistence. Mid-semester and before finals, recharge events bring therapy animals to campus; multidisciplinary working groups on suicide prevention and substance-abuse harm reduction meet year-round. A $1.36 million TRIO Services Support Grant from the U.S. Department of Education has further expanded resources for first-generation, low-income, and disabled students.

Laura Stallings, Pacific's dean of student well-being, framed the award as both recognition and obligation, a chance, she noted, to honor the pathways already built while staying accountable for the gaps that remain.

What this paradigm asks of all of us

The temptation, when we read a story like this, is to admire it from a safe distance; to treat a single campus as an exception rather than a template. But the underlying design choices are quietly portable. A sensory room is, at its core, a recognition that regulation precedes learning. A referral system works because it lowers the threshold for asking. A link one click deep acknowledges that people in crisis rarely have the bandwidth to search.

For those of us shaping workplaces, classrooms, or simply the rhythms of a household, the question Pacific seems to be answering is not how do we add mental health support, but where, exactly, in our daily environment, have we made connection harder than it needs to be. That, more than any award, is the design worth carrying home.