…it is evident that mistrust,
stigma, and culturally
different styles of seeking
help play important roles in
preventing access to mental
health treatment.
© ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
In a Journal of American College Health article on college
student suicide in the United States (2006), Allen Schwartz
reviewed the findings of a survey of counseling center directors
and found that approximately 80 percent of students who
kill themselves never receive mental health treatment. He
reported that if students do receive treatment, they are six
times less likely to kill themselves. The challenge for higher
education institutions is to allocate resources and develop
programs to lower barriers to care for students at greatest risk.
Based on the research on help-seeking behavior and conversations with reluctant students, it is evident that mistrust,
stigma, and culturally different styles of seeking help play
important roles in preventing access to mental health treatment. Without programs that address these issues head on,
the consequences can be dire.
Take Services to Students
At Cornell University, counseling center outreach
addresses these challenges by training staff to recognize and support students who are under acute stress,
by offering consultations to faculty and staff who come into
contact with distressed students, and by providing access
to counselors in nontraditional ways, often outside of the
counseling center environment. Two Cornell programs, Let’s
Talk and Community Consultation and Intervention (CCI),
expand the traditional scope of outreach. The programs
provide both benefits and challenges as they are integrated
into existing support systems within the counseling center
and across campus.
Let’s Talk and CCI were developed to engage students who
would not otherwise seek professional support. Engagement
is often described as a beginning stage of counseling, one that
might be returned to at various times throughout the course
of treatment. Let’s Talk and CCI aim to engage the student—
and sometimes intervene—prior to any formal counseling
intervention. Through informal conversations, problem-solving, advocacy, and consultation with individuals who are
supporting a student, a counselor builds a relationship that
lays a strong foundation for more formal counseling. In many
cases, counseling is unnecessary once the initial problem is
solved. In other cases, trust and credibility are established so
the work of counseling can begin.
Let’s Talk offers students free, walk-in visits with counselors
at 10 locations across campus Mondays through Fridays. The
locations are specifically selected to be close to communities
of students who historically underutilize mental health services and near colleges and departments with particularly high
academic demands. All sites are open to the entire student
community and are staffed by social workers and psychologists from the counseling center. A Let’s Talk visit lacks many
institutional trappings of the counseling center: There are
no appointments. The visit takes place in a neutral and more
familiar location. There is no required paperwork to be read
