Reasons aside, I was recently advised to consider Counseling and Psychological Services with the assurance that going there didn’t mean that I was on the verge of a mental breakdown. But it could have. And it has.
And when that happened, CAPS did its best to help me re-orient myself before referring me to a series of strange names with impressive qualifications within a three-mile radius of UCLA. Whether any of these professionals could have helped me chip away at my mountain of issues is indeterminable given that with no time, too much fear and an ongoing impulse to withdraw from school, I never followed through.
I am not alone. About half of the students referred to off-campus counseling and psychological resources, myself included, don’t pursue further care even though their referrals indicate they need it.
The struggle to utilize mental health services off campus and stay in school at UCLA is now shared by anyone whose mental health warrants attention longer than six hours a year. This year, CAPS has reduced the number of appointments available to students from 10 to six. Students who need more time to work through their issues will be referred to Behavioral Health Services at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center or other professionals in the area, depending on their insurance.
While this referral system attempts to offer a balance of on-campus and community resources, it fails to account for a number of factors which might prevent a student from following through. The University of California needs to re-assess students’ needs across the system and encourage its counseling facilities to be more flexible and maintain services for students regardless of how many sessions they need.
Without long-term resources on campus, pre-existing conditions can compound without attention. At a UC Regents Committee on Health Services meeting in January, UC Student Health Insurance Program medical director Dr. Regina Fleming said that while there are no numbers on how many students withdraw because of their mental health, she suspected a great number of withdrawals were a consequence of mental health issues.
The reduction at CAPS reflects the UC-wide priority to address as many students’ mental health as possible and is intended to help redistribute the notoriously understaffed and underfunded facility’s resources. While this effectively allows on-campus psychologists and psychiatrists to address a larger volume of cases, it edges out the portion of the student body that needs on-campus services the most.
This isn’t a permanent solution, but counseling centers across the UC would be better serving student bodies if they gave students access to mental health professionals without capping the number of their visits.
Allowing campuses to create hard-and-fast limits on mental health services’ availability runs the risk of misclassifying the severity of some students’ needs. There is no binary strictly dividing students who need short-term versus long-term treatment, and creating an explicit limit on students’ visits may allow several to fall by the wayside if their baggage cannot be addressed in six sessions or less.
While outside resources are better equipped to handle long-term cases, these facilities are frequently too far, too unfamiliar or too overwhelming to access for students whose mental health is already strained. The convenience of an on-campus facility is intended to mitigate constraints created by geographic, temporal and personal conditions, all of which are compounded with the realities of student life.
Dr. Fleming said that, across the nation, a significant number of students are starting college with pre-existing mental health conditions that the University does not have enough resources to treat.
This means that, with limited resources, the UC prioritizes preventative care.
Preventative measures – usually short-term in nature – are important, and ensuring that students have assistance in handling the stresses of higher education is necessary, but the University loses accessibility as it procedurally excludes students with chronic needs. While maintaining preventative care is necessary, the University currently focuses on it at the expense of reactive care, merely because reactive care takes more resources.
This isn’t to say that students with less urgent needs shouldn’t think of CAPS as an open resource. Too often, students are made to feel like their problems are not pressing enough to warrant attention. But longer wait times to accommodate students who need more appointments are a small price to pay to ensure CAPS isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that excludes a smaller, but still in-need subset of the student population.
No one is under the impression that the University’s counseling centers are adequate as they stand now and the UC has made provisions for future funding, but until those funds are available, making CAPS scheduling more flexible is a much fairer balance of resources.
It’s admirable that the University community has found success deconstructing the stigma surrounding students’ access to mental health services, but leaving at-risk students to contend with and for themselves is a dangerous way to serve the student body as a whole.