The Caring Campus project was a three-year intervention research project funded by Movember Canada that fostered new awareness regarding the interconnection between gender, mental health, and substance (specifically alcohol) misuse on three university campuses in Canada, and encouraged new approaches to promote young men’s health. In this project, we demonstrated that male students are willing to assume leadership roles to promote mental health and healthier alcohol use to their peers and enact a social agenda for change. Empowerment strategies encouraged male students to enlist like-minded peers to advance men’s mental health and transform campus drinking cultures, including countering gender-based ideals and norms associated with mental health problems and substance misuse. There is now great potential to influence the way in which other post-secondary institutions approach mental wellness and substance misuse using the Caring Campus model, which uses student empowerment to catalyze change.

This paper describes the development and psychometric testing of the Substance Use Wellness Tool, created to help raise awareness about alcohol and other substance misuse among university undergraduates. The tool is a self- and peer-reflection guide that students can use to monitor and alter their patterns of substance use. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis showed that the tool was unidimensional and that all 13 assessed domains were important. Cronbach’s alpha indicated the tool was highly reliable. Construct (convergent) validity for alcohol use with the 10-item AUDIT was also good, with strong correlations overall and within subgroups defined by gender, year of study, and university site.

Although many individual risk factors have been identified for student mental health problems and alcohol misuse, there is a relative paucity of research that examines how variables, such as campus environment, contribute to students’ experiences of these problems. This study examined a series of perceived campus environment factors (e.g., feeling valued, feeling they fit in, believing faculty care about them, perceived administrative concern for mental health and substance abuse) and the relationships among these perceived campus environment variables and students’ mental well-being, risk of harmful drinking, and their willingness to seek help for a substance use or mental health concern. A total of 1,885 first-year undergraduate university students including 938 females, 936 males and 11 “non-binary” participants, from three geographically diverse Canadian university sites, completed online surveys. The results demonstrated significant associations among the perceived campus environment variables and both mental health and alcohol misuse outcomes. It was also observed that whether a student lived in residence or off campus significantly affected which campus environment factors were most associated with their reported mental health and alcohol misuse. Additionally, willingness to help-seek was related with students’ perceptions of campus culture. These patterns globally demonstrated the importance of campus culture for student mental health and alcohol use. Strengths and limitations of the study, as well as directions for future research on the relations of campus culture to mental health, substance use, and help-seeking are discussed.

This paper describes a project that took place at three large Canadian universities aimed at engaging male students to address alcohol misuse and associated mental health issues through a gendered and campus culture lens. Although considerable effort has been put into decreasing alcohol misuse on campuses, most of this effort has been aimed at individual factors, rather than targeting the cultural and gendered context through which most post-secondary students consume alcohol. Gender transformative and gender sensitive health promotion approaches were guiding frameworks for the project. In addition to discussing how gender theory was implemented in a post-secondary context, this paper also explores some of the key features that guided these projects including the Summit Model, social marketing, sharing narratives of alcohol misuse and mental health, and planning for sustainability. Key lessons learned in engaging male students to be involved in challenging gendered norms related to alcohol misuse on campus are discussed.

Alcohol intoxication is often involved for both victims and perpetrators of sexual victimization. Yet, alcohol-involved sexual victimization research has mainly focused on female victims, excluding male victims. The current study addresses gaps in the literature by focusing on sex differences in the emotional harms (anxiety and depression symptomatology) experienced by sexual victimization victims when either the perpetrator or victim was drinking. Five-hundred-and-ten undergraduate drinkers (153 male; 357 female) participated. Models included two dichotomized predictors that occurred during participants’ first year of university (sexually victimized when the victim was drinking, sexually victimized by someone who was drinking), and two emotional outcomes (anxiety, depression). Age was controlled in all path analyses and sex was examined as a moderator. When predictors were examined in separate models, both predictors were associated with increased anxiety but not depression. These effects were significantly stronger among men. When both predictors were entered simultaneously, individuals who were victimized by someone drinking displayed increased anxiety, and this relationship was stronger among men than women victims. Being victimized when drinking was no longer associated with anxiety, consistent with prior findings that post-traumatic distress may be minimized when a trauma occurs while the victim is intoxicated. Results highlight the impact sexual victimization can have for both male and female victims, and point to the need for evidence-based policies to prevent emotional second-hand alcohol harms among male and female students alike.

The social norms approach to changing excessive drinking behaviour is predicated upon findings that overestimations of peer drinking predict one’s own drinking behaviour. Prior studies have yet to examine whether such social norms effects pertain equally to both genders. First-year students from a Canadian university (N = 1,155; 696 males, 459 females) were assessed for the relationship between misperceived drinking norms and hazardous drinking using the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test-Consumption scale (AUDIT-C). A significant positive relationship between the overestimated drinking frequency norm and hazardous drinking was determined for female students, where the odds of hazardous drinking increased by 1.92 (95% CI: 1.32–2.79) when the norm of other female students was overestimated. A non-significant association was found for male students, where the odds of hazardous drinking were unrelated to overestimation of the drinking norm of other male students. The null association for male students highlights a potential problem when using social norms interventions for alcohol reduction for males in the university context. Implications of these results for the utilization of the social norms approach to alcohol reduction are discussed.