Students seeking to book an appointment at Student Psychological Services (SPS) are facing a waiting list dozens of people long and a wait time of a week or more.
“When I had called, I want to say there were, like, 25 people on the wait list,” said Jordyn Silveira, a junior accounting major. “It took me maybe two weeks to get off the waiting list into SPS.”
Christina Lian, a senior psychology major who started seeing an SPS psychologist as a junior, also found it difficult to schedule an appointment with a therapist, especially compared to the semester before. “I was able to start right up with a therapist and she really, really helped me,” Lian said. “This semester, I’ve noticed that it has been particularly harder; I’ve tried to get to see the same therapist, but it was a little difficult.”
Facing a high volume of students vying for an appointment with one of the eight full-time psychologists, three post-doctoral fellows or two part-time psychiatrists, SPS struggles to keep up with the demand. Many students attempt to use SPS’ free individual therapy sessions only to be penned down for an appointment that is weeks away.
“When you always have to schedule something ahead of time, what you’re currently feeling — you may have been like, ‘OK, well, it’s over now.’ But at the time, it’s like, ‘I kind of need this resource right now,’” Lian said.
Students are increasingly seeking professional help for their emotional health.
In its description of emotional health, SPS includes such characterizations as the ability to “let go of mistakes and learn from them,” “know how to say no and exert self-control with self and with others” and “valuing self regardless of what other[s] think.” In the 2013-14 school year — during which 1 in 8 LMU students went to SPS — almost 48 percent of students went of their own volition, and 20 percent were referred by a friend.
As busy as SPS has been, both Silveira and Lian took some personal responsibility for the difficulties in scheduling appointments.
“It was hard to find time for myself ... because my schedule was so overbooked,” said Silveira. Lian also added, “It was also my schedule,” and classes often fell into the same time slot that her therapist offered.
“Maybe they need to look into hiring more therapists,” Silveira noted. “If [the wait list] is so common and it is a problem, then it should be fixed, right?”
THE ISSUE
Many students, like Silveira, find themselves seeking help from SPS due to academic and personal obstacles. It was a combination of schoolwork, a 30-hour work week, job interviews and a fresh breakup that drove Silveira to make an appointment.
“I kind of just needed somebody to talk through and find out if this was normal and how do I work through these things to get back to a healthy mindset,” she said. Anxiety (55 percent), depression (40 percent) and relationship problems are the most common reasons students seek help from SPS.
However, her first and only appointment with SPS — which came to fruition after a two-week wait — did not go as she expected. When she showed up to the office, she observed a scheduling mishap. “There was a student at the desk while I was waiting, and she got basically skimped out on her appointment because of just a miscommunication,” she recalled.
Her own session “was helpful in the sense that I think he understood what I was saying,” she said. However, despite being offered a second appointment the following week, Silveira has not returned. “There were a few reasons why I didn’t want to go back,” she said. “I felt like I would’ve wanted to have a different person, and I knew they were very backed up.” She aims to have another therapy session in the spring semester, hoping the office will be less booked.
“I think they definitely do their job well. I think it’s more of a structure thing they need to focus on,” Silveira said. “If they weren’t so overbooked in trying to fit everyone in as fast as possible, I think they could spend a little more time trying to match up therapists better, maybe try to get the student’s preference on whom they’d like to see.”
Cheyenne Weinstein, a senior psychology major, offered another way that SPS could better serve the students. Weinstein believes that more crisis counselors are necessary, as there is only one on call at a time.
“If someone’s going through a problem like I know I was, I want to seek help as soon as possible,” Weintstein said. “I would just suggest for the school itself to maybe allocate more resources for them so they could have more individuals who could talk with the students.”
SPS Director Kristin Linden told the Loyolan that LMU’s ratio of counselors to students is 1 to 1,100, far better than the national average. According to the 2014 National Survey of College Counseling Centers, “The ratio of counselors to clients, on average, was 1 to 2,081 students, with smaller schools having much better ratios.”
The University is proactive in taking steps to alleviate the strain on SPS’ resources. “The administration has been very supportive in addressing our staffing needs, and SPS clinicians have been working hard to design new programs to address our growing demands, such as providing new therapy groups this semester,” said Mimi Hoang, a psychologist at SPS.
Many administrative departments are working to address the issue. “Dr. Bove [the senior vice president of student affairs] is acutely aware of the issues facing LMU students and is tremendously supportive in providing resources and responding to student needs,” Linden said in an email.
Linden also works with Jeanne Ortiz, the dean of students and vice president of student affairs, who has been seeking a solution that would mitigate the stress on SPS.
“One of the things that our experience across the board is showing us is that students are experiencing heightened levels of distress,” Ortiz said. To “make appointments more accessible to students,” she has been figuring out how to “get more resources to Student Psychological Services so students are able to be seen in a timely manner and begin the process of their own growth and healing.”
THE TREND
Ortiz, who communicated with administrators at other universities, says many others are in a similar position of having to re-evaluate their counseling centers because of rising demand across the country. “The trend that we see on our campus is not unlike what is being experienced on other college campuses,” she said.
While SPS is used to resorting to waiting lists due to an “increase of students seeking SPS during the half-way point due to an increase in academic stress” according to Hoang, the current high demand surpasses even the current upward trend.
According to a Healthy Minds Study at the University of Michigan that sampled 160,000 students across the country, 22 percent of college students seek psychological services every year. And the American College Health Association found that the percentage of college students who report experiencing “overwhelming anxiety” went up in the past 5 years, from 46.4 percent to 54 percent of all college students. Hara Estroff Marano offers a reason for this in her Psychology Today article titled “Crisis U.”
She wrote, “Having had — or been allowed to have — few disappointments in their over-parented, over-trophied lives, many have not learned to handle difficulty. In the absence of skills to dispel disappointment, difficulty becomes catastrophe.” Students are buckling under the pressure to perform well in classes, which is exacerbated by encountering emotions and stress that they had been protected from, according to Elizabeth Gong-Guy, executive director of student resilience at UCLA. “Many come from families where they have not been allowed to develop stress tolerance,” she said. “Some of the coping with their own emotions is developmentally delayed.”
Despite the trend, some professors have not noticed a significant difference in students’ resilience — which psychologists believe is declining in the current generation of students.
“Some students may be less resilient, but I believe an equal number are more resilient,” said Molly Youngkin, a professor in LMU’s English department who advises 28 English majors and teaches one upper-division English class and one First-Year Seminar. “I don’t find that I am ‘handholding’ students.”
When she does encounter students in need of more support, Youngkin reaches out to SPS. “It’s reassuring to know that I can call SPS when I believe a student needs help, and every time I have called, SPS has responded to the call in a prompt and helpful manner.”
THE SERVICES
Through its offerings of individual, group and couples therapy, parent, faculty and staff consultation, psychiatric evaluations, education programs and more, SPS aims to foster students’ personal, social and intellectual development, as well as educate the LMU community as a whole.
“It wasn’t a crisis center and it’s not a crisis center now,” Ortiz clarified. However, “there are crisis hours every day so students can walk in if they feel they are in crisis.”
While SPS does not have a strict limit for the number of individual sessions a student can have — unlike 30 percent of college counseling centers across the country that do impose a limit, according to the 2014 National Survey of College Counseling Centers — students who are seen as in need of more long-term support receive assistance in finding an off-campus resource that can provide adequate care for the student.
“Generally speaking, students in the short-term model that’s used at SPS are usually seen anywhere between six and 10 sessions,” said Dr. Ortiz. “It’s really challenging sometimes to start with one person and move to someone else, so [SPS] finds someone that can meet their needs over a longer period of time. We are aware, and we do monitor the situation.”
Group therapy is another popular service that SPS offers.
“I went to see my therapist again, but she also recommended [I] go to an anxiety management group,” Lian said. “They give you so many different resources and things to work on, and it’s kind of like, bit by bit, you just build on it.”
The group Lian referred to is called “Break Free From Your Anxiety!” whose weekly meetings are easier to fit into her schedule than individual therapist appointments. “I just have it in my head: Wednesdays at 4 p.m., that’s what I do. I like that; I think that works better,” she said.
Other groups — called “prevention services” — include “Beat the Blues,” which addresses depression; “Grief Loss Support Group,” which “explore[s] thoughts and feelings about losing a loved one in a safe space;” “The Circle,” a confidential meeting for LGBT students and allies; “Living with Chronic Illness” and “Meditation 101.” There is also an online anxiety treatment program that SPS debuted this summer, according to Hoang, called Therapist Assisted Online (TAO), which helps a student “work on behavioral change” for anxiety and other mental health obstacles while a clinician tracks the student’s progress. A free, anonymous self-assessment is also available on SPS’ website under its services sidebar, under the link on-line screenings.
As for reaching beyond the confines of SPS’ offices, the Wellness Educator Program, sponsored by SPS, is designed as a student support network that raises awareness for not only mental health and wellness, but also all the resources available to students at SPS and off campus in an effort to reduce stigma.
HOW LMU CARES FOR ITS STUDENTS
Caring for students’ mental health is not just a concern for SPS. In SPS’ outreach, the staff worked to provide “tools to other faculty, staff [and] students to recognize students in distress, refer students who are experiencing thoughts of harm to self or others, and partnering with other departments on campus to provide an integrative supportive approach,” according to Dr. Linden. She calls this “interdepartmental collaboration,” and it extends to the Department of Public Safety, the dean of students and faculty and student organizations, among other departments.
Through this interconnectedness, students receive support for their mental health from not only SPS but also professors, supervisors, coaches and resident life advisers.
“I’ve had, in my role as the dean of students, coaches call because they’re concerned about students. Work-study supervisors call because they’ve been concerned about student well-being. Faculty members call because they’ve been concerned about student well-being,” said Ortiz. “The Dean of Students Office has historically been a place where faculty or staff or other students could share their observations and concerns about students’ well-being.”
FUTURE STEPS
As LMU keeps track of its students on the administrative level, students are also accountable for each others’ wellbeing. “Your peers have credibility. Sometimes the people in authority don’t have the same level of credibility that your peers have,” Ortiz explained.
“One of my really close friends ... has ADD,” Lian said. “With her, I found that we can really just connect and help each other. So I hope other people are able to find people like that, too.”
A new club on campus, ActiveMinds at LMU — which aims to change “the conversation about mental health to make sure that no one suffers alone in silence” — uses the power of peer-to-peer counseling to not only offer support but to also destigmatize mental health. “To have that positive peer influence through the [Active] Minds organization, I think, is a great asset for this community,” Dr. Ortiz said.
Just as much as LMU promotes the “education of the whole person,” the institution also cares for the wellbeing of the whole person as well, according to Ortiz.
“Having been at a number of different institutions, I have never experienced an institution that does it better than LMU,” Ortiz said. “The ethic of care here for students is amazing. I think it extends across the entire campus ... And the level of interest and the level of sheer desire to help students develop into the people they’re meant to be is a primary commitment of this institution.”
Ortiz is optimistic about how different aspects of LMU are committed to student’s well-being. She said, “I think students are blessed to be in a place where there’s such a strong ethic of care.”
SPS office hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. most weekdays, and a therapist is on-call after hours, reachable through SPS’ phone at (310) 338-2868.