The Well fights misinformation with numbers in new campaign

Janeal Downs
Staff Writer

Ryan Murphy
News Editor

The VCU Wellness Center recently rolled out a new effort to debunk the misconceptions many students have about student health. Called the “Real Rams Awareness Campaign,” the Well uses statistics to dispel popular beliefs about campus life popularized by movies like “Animal House.”

“There’s a theory called the social norms approach that says people act on their misperceptions rather than what they really want,” said Linda Hancock, the director of the Well. “So if you think everybody’s drinking, even if you don’t think it’s a good idea to get drunk, you’re more likely to do it if you think everybody does it.”

Hancock said the crux of the campaign is that it allows students to make choices without the pressure of misconceived social norms.

“I believe we give students the freedom to be themselves,” she said. “Real rams do take charge of their health. Real students take precautions and think about the fact that they only have one body.”

Hancock noted that the campaign is not an indictment of students who do engage in those kinds of behaviors, but rather to give students the full view before they decide to engage in risky behavior.

“You can smoke, that’s your choice, but don’t make your decision to smoke based on the fact that you think 80 percent of people smoke, because they don’t,” she said.

A “Real Rams” poster titled “Breathe-Easy Ram” provides statistics that show that, in fact, most students have never tried cigarettes and only 8 percent smoke daily. Hancock said it’s easy to think that most students do smoke because smoking is so visible. The visibility of smokers congregating outside near buildings on campus can lead to student believing smoking rates are higher than they are.

Hancock decided early in her career it was better to get ahead of problems she was seeing in hospitals rather than wait for something to happen and treat it. During a two-year stint treating patients suffering from brain trauma while working at the neuro-intensive care unit at MCV, she witnessed the unfortunate results of risky behaviors.

“I saw kids who were brain damaged because they got liquored up and hit a wall in their car or got liquored up and dived off a boat and broke their neck,” Hancock said. “You can only tell so many young people they’ll never walk again, then you decide to try and go prevent the problem.”

However, Hancock concedes that despite the real-world evidence and real-world consequences of such behaviors, it’s difficult to get the message out on a campus like VCU.

“It’s hard to reach 32,000 students in a meaningful way,” she said. “The hardest part is that we don’t do this (awareness education) culture-wide, so every year, a quarter of these students are new and I have to start over again.”