Andrew Williamson had always been interested in the health sciences – he just wasn’t sure which to pursue: mental health or community health.
At Georgia State University’s School of Public Health, he found an intersection between the two and has turned his interests into a rewarding career.
Williamson serves as the Program Coordinator for LGBTQIA+ Substance Abuse Prevention for Gwinnett United in Drug Education (GUIDE). In his role, he works with college students in the LGBTQIA+ community across Georgia, focusing on substance abuse prevention and mental wellness.
“What goes on in society directly impacts how our mental health is, so understanding those trends in public health and how it affects our bodies and minds, it’s becoming more prevalent,” he said. “The approach is not just on an individual basis but as a collective to inspire better mental health in the community.”
The Intersection of Mental Health and Public Health
Before moving toward public health, the Marietta native started his time at Georgia State in the nursing program, but he found the clinical setting wasn’t quite for him. After working a few service industry jobs, he returned to Georgia State and enrolled in the School of Public Health, seeking to explore if public health was the right fit for his career.
His vision for his future began to crystalize after taking Clinical Associate Professor Carlos A. O. Pavão’s community mental health class during his junior year.
“I was able to get in and meet Dr. Pavão and see what he was trying to explore and teach people about – focusing on mental health and public health,” Williamson said. “That got me excited and more interested about being in the public health field.”
Pavāo remains one of Williamson’s biggest advocates, and he also still draws on lessons learned from being in Clinical Associate Professor Elizabeth Armstrong-Mensah’s classes. The biggest lesson? Be accountable.
“Being in her classes, she was steadfast in really helping keep people accountable to themselves as well as to the work they were doing,” Williamson said.
Building Connections and Creating Opportunities
Williamson earned his bachelor’s degree in public health in 2022 and has carried accountability and mental health into his profession. He credits Georgia State for helping him build connections in the public health industry and creating opportunities to network.
“This is a tight community, and you have to take every opportunity to get involved in where people are at,” Williamson said. “They really taught me how to foster community and how to help others not only just to help yourself but also to create connections that can create lasting, sustainable change.”
Working in prevention can be difficult to measure, Williamson said, as the best results can be hard to see. “If you’re doing prevention well you won’t know that anything happened at all,” he added. But Williamson feels the reward of finding his place in the health sciences and in the communities he serves.
He is now considering going back to Georgia State for a Master of Public Health degree, eager to learn more about communities and how to best promote spaces for students in his program to feel safe.
“Figuring out what kind of spaces those are and what they look like and how we can help foster that, that’s critically important,” he said. “You have to work with the community to make that happen. I would encourage people to come into this field and stay with it and figure out what people need and how to meet them where they are at.”
Williamson has more advice for prospective students who are entertaining the idea of getting into the public health field.
“The No. 1 thing is to take every opportunity to meet someone new in this field and make those connections, try to get in at the ground level with people and have real conversations about what’s going on and what you might want to do,” he said. “Learn and be able to hopefully enact some kind of change for good.”