Delivering Effective College Mental Health Services

Book excerpt: An essential guide to organizing and offering mental health services on campus. Stressed by increasing student demand for mental health services, campus counseling centers across the country are grappling with how best to deliver ethical, effective, and efficient service. Hampered by limited budgets, most centers find it deeply challenging to address growing college mental health service needs. Yet little conceptual training is provided to student affairs, higher education, health, and mental health professionals who deliver campus mental health services. In Delivering Effective College Mental Health Services, psychologist Lee Keyes aims to change that. He offers sound, field-tested advice for creating a congruent, cross-division, and service-oriented college counseling enterprise that best fits its campus culture and students. This useful handbook for administering counseling services • poses questions and offers practical advice to help college counseling centers form a consistent philosophical model • lays out conceptual groundwork for constructing college counseling services, from training activities to counseling/psychotherapy processes • takes into account the pressures (time related, economic, political, cultural) that strain universities • explains how to cultivate an accurate and empathic response to each individual, their entire history and context, and their possible life trajectory Written by a leading provider of college mental health services, Delivering Effective College Mental Health Services is an essential guide to organizing and offering mental health services on university and college campuses.