Sarah Cavanaugh, author of Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge, will visit campus on Wednesday, September 17, 2025. A wide variety of events will be planned on both the Hillsboro and Forest Grove campuses, inviting students, faculty, and staff to engage with Prof. Cavanaugh and the concept of “compassionate challenge” in the college classroom.
Prepare for her Visit
Please join your fellow students, faculty, and staff in reading during Summer 2025! Copies of the book are available through:
- the Tran Library ()
- the CAS Dean's office (email Jeane Cannon to request a copy)
- or your preferred county library or online retailer
The PacU Libraries' “Summer Reading Bingo” will feature this book as a suggested read, and it can use it for one of several squares on the Bingo card!
For a taste of Sarah Cavanaugh’s work, you may also consider listening to her Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode about the book: , or one of her many other podcasts and profiles .
The Planning Team
A small workgroup of cross-campus faculty and staff are supporting the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office in preparing for this author visit. If you have ideas about impactful programming, an existing event that could align with her visit, or any other ideas/requests, please reach out any time to Morgan Knapp at morganknapp@pacificu.edu.
About the Book
Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge is “an investigation into the mental health crisis affecting young adults today, and an impassioned argument for creating learning environments characterized both by compassion and challenge”. Alarming statistics in recent years indicate that mental health problems like depression and anxiety have been skyrocketing among young adults. While major stakeholders argue over whether we need greater compassion or whether so-called “coddling” might in fact be driving up rates of mental health problems and we should instead introduce more challenge, psychologist and professor Sarah Rose Cavanagh presents extensive evidence to argue that this is a false duality. Instead, she proposes that first we need to create learning and living environments characterized by compassion, and then we need to guide our youth into practices that encourage challenge. .
About the Author
Sarah Rose Cavanaugh is the senior associate director for teaching and learning at the Center for Faculty Excellence and an associate professor of practice in psychology at Simmons University. Her research considers whether the strategies people choose to regulate their emotions and the degree to which they successfully accomplish this regulation can predict trajectories of psychological functioning over time. Prof. Cavanaugh’s other books include The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion and HIVEMIND: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World.