When Rebecca Osborne made her first appointment at NC State’s Counseling Center, she was excited she wouldn’t have to leave campus to reserve therapy. She walked through the doors of student health optimistic that counseling would make her transition from high school to college easier.
Unfortunately, Rebecca Osborne, a first-year studying psychology, had a rough transition to finding the right counselor. In fact, the counselor she has now doesn’t even work for NC State’s Counseling Center. Once a week, she walks 10 minutes to her car and drives downtown for an off-campus counseling session.
Despite different initiatives over the past few years, the Counseling Center has struggled to keep up with students’ needs. It’s clear efforts are being made to destigmatize mental health and counseling, but the demand for services has grown at a rate at which NC State’s on-campus solutions cannot match.
“Stop the Stigma”
The “Stop the Stigma” initiative, featured on shirts, bobbleheads and fliers across campus, is intended to normalize seeking counseling and talking about mental health. This initiative may have been a factor in the dramatic increase in usage of the Counseling Center over the years.
In the 2012-13 academic year, the center saw 3,833 students. During just the fall semester of 2019, the Counseling Center was utilized by over 4,000 students, showing demand has effectively doubled for services.
According to Monica Osburn, executive director at the Counseling Center, the amount of students seeking counseling doesn’t correspond with increasing admission rates.
“We are seeing more in just the fall semester than we saw [in 2012], and we haven’t increased in enrollment that much,” Monica Osburn said. “That’s what happens when you stop the stigma, and it’s a good thing, but we can’t manage the demand.”
This trend has been present not only at NC State, but at colleges across the U.S. According to Time, the number of students visiting campus counseling centers across approximately 140 universities increased by 30%, while admissions only increased 6% from 2009 to 2015.
Many NC State students said conversations around mental health have changed over time.
Jenaye Gaudreau, a fourth-year studying communication media, said the biggest change regarding mental health is increased access to information.
“The only thing that’s really changed is literacy,” she said. “It probably wasn’t great for people before, but they’re probably just more mental health literate in this generation.”
Connor Ritter, a third-year studying math and civil engineering, said current college students are more open to talking about mental health.
“I feel like even if you look back two or three decades it wasn’t even part of the conversation,” Ritter said. “I think now that there’s less isolation and also less judgment that goes along with mental health. Now people realize that taking care of your mental health is just as important as physical health.”
Marc Grimmett, co-director and founder of Community Counseling, Education and Research Center (CCERC), said he’s seen the stigma of mental health shift over the years he has been practicing. The fact that celebrities and athletes are talking more openly about going to therapy helps normalize the topic, he said.
“It opens up the conversation to talk more openly about mental health needs and overall needs as human beings,” Grimmett said.
Keeping up with Demand
The Counseling Center has expanded over time to keep up with the increased student demand, despite battling budget issues.
According to Monica Osburn, the center is placed in a unique position because they don’t have a budget from North Carolina’s government.
“We’re kind of stuck in the middle,” Monica Osburn said. “We don’t really have other funding sources to be able to grow the resources in the counseling center other than increasing student fees, and that’s not really something we take lightly.”
The Counseling Center has doubled its staff over the past seven years. As of 2020, there are 34 paid staff members servicing the Counseling Center.
Over the last four years, professionals at the Counseling Center have built a case management team and an improved referral database program to assist students in finding an off-campus provider. Students can use the database to search for a therapist in the area who takes their insurance.
For Monica Osburn, the rise in conversations of mental health causes an increased demand. In order to try to accommodate everyone, professionals at the counseling center created different initiatives. However, these initiatives still prevent many students from being able to access individual therapy.
According to the 2018 Annual Report, the Counseling Center offers 24 group therapy programs that professionals frequently encourage students to take advantage of in order to manage the demand.
“A certain percentage gets referred to group [therapy],” Monica Osburn said. “We only have a finite number of resources and not everybody can get individual counseling. We have to make some of those tough decisions.”
The center does not provide services for most diagnosed mental health conditions like on-going anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Monica Osburn said anything requiring more than six sessions is typically referred out.
“We still see those students, but we try to manage the crisis or urgent things happening, and then bridge them to an off-campus provider that can provide longer-term care,” Monica Osburn said. “Someone with complex trauma needs weekly therapy.”
The Counseling Center’s Efforts May Not Be Enough
Monica Osburn said the Counseling Center still has a long way to go.
“I can’t say that we’re leaps and bounds better,” Monica Osburn said. “Our wait times are still too long, we still have more demand that we can’t meet, there is still a portion of our students that are unhappy with our services because they are referred out or can’t be seen as often as they want. All of those things are still true. I don’t want to act like they’re not, but we just haven’t been able to get ahead of the demand, even with all of the increases.”
Though Rebecca Osborne was placed in a three-week-long group theory session, the whole process of talking about her anxiety in a group setting only made Rebecca more anxious, and it wasn’t until almost eight months later when she met an off-campus counselor she liked. The Counseling Center did provide her with resources to find a therapist.
“They basically showed me how to find a list of therapists in Raleigh and said ‘have fun,’” Rebecca Osborne said.
She expected the Counseling Center to be more helpful, especially after hearing about their programs through presentations by mental health ambassadors.
“Just saying ‘Stop the Stigma’ isn’t really doing anything,” Rebecca Osborne said. “It’s just three words that mean nothing unless you actually deal with the problem.”
Anna James, a third-year studying communications, said she had to find an off-campus counselor on her own. The waiting process at the center was too long for the help she needed.
“In the end, I did my own research and went through recommendations from other people to find my own therapist,” James said. “I was Googling therapists in Raleigh in the midst of a really hard time, and made an appointment with the Counseling Center because they said they had resources to help me connect, and again it was just so much waiting. I remember sophomore year, when I had really bad anxiety and was just waiting for 30 minutes, and I remember thinking, ‘If they don’t call my name in the next five minutes, I’m going to have to leave.’”
Monica Osburn said “Stopping the Stigma” could lead to population-based intervention. She said not all students need to seek counseling to navigate through their problems.
“All students struggle with stress, anxiety and relationship issues,” Monica Osburn said. “What’s different is their coping skills and their resilience to bounce back from that. Not all students struggle from a mental health condition. How can we use population intervention to build up things like grit, resilience and support tools to manage these things as opposed to them having to come to the Counseling Center to learn these skills?”
According to Grimmett, everyone can benefit from seeking counseling regardless of whether or not someone has a pre-diagnosed condition.
“I am a counselor, and I go to see my counselor because I want to be my best possible self, and I want to live life to its fullest,” Grimmett said. “I do not necessarily have anything that is really bothering me or anything that is keeping me distressed. I just want to go and talk through being a parent and being a partner to the person I am married to.”
Grimmett said the need for counseling is relative. To say that not everyone needs counseling furthers stigma.
“You do not need to have a severe mental illness necessarily to do that. Anybody can benefit from [therapy],” Grimmett said.
Grimmett said that people can benefit from talking to friends and family about issues they face, but the expectations of those relationships and seeing a counselor are different.
“In this case, you can just go in and focus on yourself for the entire session and then leave without having to reciprocate what you would have in a friendship,” Grimmett said. “Sometimes that is what we need … to really focus on ourselves.”
Editor’s note: This article was originally written for ENG 416 Advanced News and Article Writing and was submitted for publication by the writers.
