Auburn Universities Student Counseling Service is undergoing changes following the release of the Mental Health Task Force findings during the 2016 spring semester.
The Mental Health Task Force analyzed a variety of surveys and focus groups including students, faculty and staff to determine what the Student Counseling Service can do better for the student body.
“We need more resources to take on the challenges we face with mental health, because we have administration that is receptive to student needs, those resources will be allocated,” Westerhouse said. “We are very thankful to go to a school that is so willing to work with and hear out students.”
Doug Hankes, director of Student Counseling Services in the Division of Student Affairs, said that Auburn is overwhelmed with the number of students coming in because it is progressively becoming more each year and they want to do the best they can to accommodate everyone.
“The biggest one [Task Force finding] is having additional resources and the recommendations, think this is over the next 5-6 years, is to double the size of the staff,” Hankes said. “There is no way to hire all those people at once, but the university has made a financial commitment to doing that over the next 5-6 years.”
Hankes said they plan on hiring more psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors and an additional case manager, because at the end of the last two springs semesters they’ve had a waiting list.
“One of the people we’ve hired since the Task Force Recommendations has come out is a Case Manager and we are going to be hiring a second one,” Hankes said. “This case managers job is to solely to keep track of how people are doing on the waiting list so that there is more one-on-one attention and to make sure some of these symptoms or issues have not worsened.”
Students would be able to come in and schedule consultation sessions with the case managers so they can check-in to see how they’re doing until they get assigned to a counselor, Hankes said.
Westerhouse said they [SGA] hope over time there will be program expansion and new programs added as needed with the additional resources being added to the counseling services.
“With more resources we will see an increase in counselors and with that, the hope is that wait times will decrease dramatically,” Westerhouse said.
Student counseling services also received recommendations including a 24/7 mental health crisis line and the development of a APA Credited Doctoral Internship, which would give the service four more professionals that are almost done with medical school, Hankes said.
“They function as a full time employee,” Hankes said. “They can come from anywhere in the country.”
The internship would be competitive and make Auburn the only college counseling center in Alabama offering one.
Hankes said that they offer the counseling service, free of charge, because they want to see students be successful academically.
“Some students are not successful because they don’t do the basic stuff like going to classes, studying enough and just doing the work,” Hankes said. “Some students struggle academically because of mental health related kind of stuff.”
Hankes said college is a time where you sometimes see the first signs of serious mental illness because it is a stressful time for many students and can bring out underlying issues that went noticed or were ignored before.
“We market ourselves as the Auburn Family and if that is the case then you take care of the members of your family,” Hankes said. “If there is something going on mental health related, then why wouldn’t we offer that assistants.”
Hankes said one of the things that surprised him from the focus groups is the number of students that didn’t even know their services existed; this semester their case manager will be going out to all the different colleges and school across the campus with an informational table to answer questions so people can see us.
The primary focus of the Student Counseling Service for this year is suicide prevention, Hankes said.
Westerhouse said that they want to see the “stigma” surrounding the resource changes so people can know the service is there and Auburn can help.
“College is such a high-stress time for so many, having accessible counselors allows students to work through mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders and etc.,” Westerhouse said. “It is one of the most important things for a student body to have access to these resources.”
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