Mental-health counselors at community colleges rarely handle only mental-health issues. They also offer academic advising, career counseling, and transfer services. On some campuses, they even run food pantries.
Meanwhile, they’re trying to help a growing number of students with mental-health problems that are increasingly severe. More than half of the community-college counselors in a survey released in 2014 said more students were seeking help for depression and anxiety disorders, among other issues.
While four-year institutions, too, cope with a rising tide of troubled students, community colleges face special challenges. Their students are typically older, with families of their own. Many have experienced personal or financial setbacks that prevented them from attending college at an age when students traditionally do.
“People don’t really get the complexity of mental-health issues that community-college students face,” says Marge Reyzer, coordinator of health services at MiraCosta College. Last fall the 14,500-student institution, in Oceanside, Calif., counseled 11 suicidal students and saw an increase in students with post-traumatic stress disorder, she says. “We see one crisis after another.”
Yet community colleges have the fewest resources. Only 8 percent of the counselors in the recent survey said their institutions provided on-site psychiatry; 19 percent said no personal or mental-health counseling at all was offered. Other surveys have found that most four-year colleges have such services.
Tight budgets can blur boundaries in a way that’s not helpful, says Amy M. Lenhart, a counselor at Collin County Community College, in Texas, who is president of the American College Counseling Association. “If you are academically advising a student you have also counseled during a crisis, it’s just not a good mix,” she says. “Most counselors continue to wear those different hats.”
To meet the growing need for mental-health services, she says, community colleges are getting creative. Here’s how:
Building Partnerships
With resources scarce, community partnerships are key for two-year colleges, says Susan Quinn, director of student health services at Santa Rosa Junior College, in California. They are especially useful in cases the college isn’t equipped to handle — when, for example, a student is delusional or suffers a breakdown. If that happens, she says, a county-based team of licensed clinicians is summoned.
The county team is represented at meetings of the college’s crisis-intervention group, which meets regularly to discuss how to handle potential problems. Many colleges, two- and four-year alike, created such teams following the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech. Having a county employee present makes it less likely that a student will fall through the cracks if he or she is dismissed from the college because of safety concerns.
69% OF COUNSELING CENTER DIRECTORS HAVE SEEN INCREASE IN CRISIS REQUIRING IMMEDIATE RESPONSE
“We all learned from the Arizona case,” says Ms. Quinn, referring to the 2011 shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by a recently suspended student from Pima Community College. “Our responsibility shouldn’t just stop with dismissing the student. That person would still be on our county’s radar screen because of the unique relationship we have.”
Using Interns
Community partnerships aren’t always enough. There is also more demand for campus counseling services, says Ms. Reyzer, at MiraCosta. The number of visits per year for mental-health counseling there has more than doubled over the past decade. To meet that need, MiraCosta has turned to unpaid volunteers from the area. The strategy has its critics, who, like Ms. Lenhart, worry that these interns aren’t always equipped to deal with severe mental-health issues. But Ms. Reyzer says they offer a solution to limited staffing.
Ms. Reyzer’s office hires one part-time licensed marriage-and-family therapist and eight interns, who need a certain number of clinical hours before becoming licensed by the state. The interns have master’s degrees in marriage-and-family therapy, so the college is fulfilling its role as an educational institution, she says. “We make no bones about it to students in need of counseling that they’ll be seeing an intern.”
Turning to Peer Education
Many students who need help never seek it. One cost-effective method to reach more of them is through other students, a strategy that some community colleges are embracing. MiraCosta hires about a dozen peer educators per semester, Ms. Reyzer says. These students go into classrooms to give presentations about stress, anxiety, and depression, and often describe their own struggles.
Javiera Quinteros Bizama, a second-year student majoring in marine biology, has delivered about 30 such presentations, in which she has talked about the suicide of a friend who was depressed.
At the end of the visit, she hands out an information packet that includes a San Diego suicide-hotline number, a fact sheet about depression, and descriptions of counseling resources at MiraCosta. Students are more receptive to the information, she says, when it comes from classmates.
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
