by Chris Gregory and Jennifer Whitney
It’s a round-the-clock responsibility to provide college and university students with mental health care and support. For residence life staff, that may take the form of providing help after an incident or responding to a report of concerning behavior. For campus counselors, it may mean ongoing conversations with students in need. In reality, though, there is no true division of duties when it comes to student care. That means it is paramount for residence life offices and counseling centers to closely collaborate in order to best deliver the services residents need. All successful partnerships require an ongoing investment with reciprocal feedback focused on enhancing the relationship and thus the services offered.
The growing mental health crisis impacting college students is all too familiar to campus staff. In the 2018-19 Healthy Minds Study, representing a non-clinical sample, 18% of students surveyed screened positive for depression on the PHQ-9, a highly validated and powerful nine-item depression screening. The 2019 version of the study indicated that only 36% of students with symptoms of mental health concerns engaged in treatment services, such as medication or therapy, and further indicated that 64% of symptomatic students do not seek treatment. Given the increasing concerns and the finite capacity of counseling centers, campuses are searching for ways to expand their capacity to meet students’ mental health needs. In many cases, the community most readily accessible and relied upon is the residence life staff.
Consider the University of North Carolina Greensboro where, although only 25% of the total student body lives on campus, 53% of those identified as “students of concern” were residential students. Fortunately, residential students have access to staff and resources within their living space and thus come to the attention of college and university staff more readily than their off-campus counterparts. A cornerstone to UNC Greensboro’s effort to meet these demands is its Counseling-Res Life Liaison program, which pairs a clinical provider from the counseling center with a coordinator for residence life, usually a live-in professional staff member. The liaison program reaches out to the residential university community through a variety of programs and presentations in order to promote a positive mental health environment, provide consultation services, and maintain collaborative relationships with the hall staff. The program promotes and develops a culture of acceptance and help-seeking within the residence halls, where students have the greatest likelihood of having their psychological and social needs met. Counseling center and res life staff meet and collaborate to share expertise and information; plan collaborative programs, training, and projects; and consult on emerging issues in the residential community. Liaison relationships help to increase the capacity of the community to provide support for struggling students. Alice Franks, a staff psychologist in the counseling center, notes that “the liaison relationship has the effect of extending the counseling center by building the skills within housing to deliver wellness and mental health information as a sort of train the trainer program.”
Though there will always be crises to respond to, practitioners must be proactive in providing outreach and services to prevent problems where possible.
Such relationships provide primary and secondary prevention within the residence halls, reduce barriers to treatment by creating bridges from residence life to the counseling center, and foster a social and cultural environment for seeking help. The partnership also reduces stigma by making mental health and wellness central to the community. Despite an increased acceptance of mental health struggles, stigma remains the number one reason why students do not seek treatment. Franks believes that the liaison helps “build a relationship of trust, to break down barriers to allow both parties to ask questions and consult about complicated situations. The liaison relationship sets it up to be natural and expected. And the relationship isn’t a one-way street. The residence life staff help counseling center providers to understand the trends within the halls and the needs of the community beyond those of the students who seek services within the center. The counseling center staff enjoy making relationships outside of our offices.” And, she jokes, “Some of us were even RAs in a past life.”
In order to meet the unplanned but inevitable needs of students in crisis, many institutions have implemented a campus-wide committee dedicated to sharing information in an effort to provide needed resources and minimize the severity of issues negatively affecting students’ ability to succeed in college. While care teams are a part of most campuses, the composition of membership, meeting frequency, and scope of work vary by institution. Offices most represented on these teams include the dean of students, residence life, counseling services, campus police, and the Title IX office. Others that may be included are the offices of disability services, student conduct, student organization services, and even athletics.
Brian Daniel, director of residence life at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, explains that, on his campus, “this team works to identify and provide support to students who are in need of assistance. Each office brings forward names of students of concern. I will bring forth names I have heard from RAs and share the information the RAs are hearing on the floor. Besides counseling, folks from academic affairs and our diversity and inclusion office are part of the meeting as well. We then follow up on best ways to support our students – whether a member from the dean’s office calls a student to check in with them about academics and class absences, or if I then ask an RA to follow up with a student who others on the team are concerned about. The benefit of this partnership is a streamlined process of communication in an effort to help students in need.”
Though there will always be crises to respond to, practitioners must be proactive in providing outreach and services to prevent problems where possible. Identifying issues of concern for residential students is vital for connecting them with the appropriate resources. MarQuita Barker, director of residence life at Elon University in North Carolina, notes that “living on campus away from home can be empowering for many students, but it can also present new challenges. Increased responsibility and autonomy and homesickness can interfere with a student’s ability to function at their full capacity.” To address this, residence life and counseling services offices at Elon offer workshops on stress management, healthy sleep practices, resiliency, and life after loss to residential students early in the academic year. Many campuses have a set slate of yearly programs on sexual health and appropriate behavior, alcohol or drug dependency and support, and healthy living. These standard offerings are supplemented by topics of immediate concern or topics of need based on campus demographics.
Both residence life and the counseling center bring specific expertise and strengths. By working together, each can better serve students. The partnership is multifaceted and consistently evaluated and refined to ensure continued effectiveness. Outside of the frequent interactions related to student crises, training needs, and general follow up, there should be a designated staff member (or several) from each office who can determine the overall effectiveness of current processes and can identify needed changes. Each department should share triumphs and concerns from individual interactions through these designated points of contact. This will help ensure that good ideas are shared with all staff and that certain issues affecting multiple staff members (or students) are known, so that a systematic resolution can be sought between the two departments.
SIDE EFFECTS
Ask most any resident assistant or any advancing professional in a live-in position about their major concern, and they likely will say it is how they will respond to a student in crisis. With a vibrant relationship between the counseling center and residence life offices, though, staff will be better prepared if and when such an event occurs.
Counseling center staff frequently are asked to lead training for resident assistants to help them identify students in distress and make appropriate referrals. For some schools, this training focuses on picking up cues in body language or verbal communication. Others offer training focused on motivational interviewing, with counseling staff teaching RAs techniques to help the resident openly share more information when they sense a student may be in crisis.
Many residence life offices utilize simulation-based training exercises for resident assistants. These behind closed doors activities are often scheduled at the end of RA training to evaluate a staff member’s ability to handle expected student interactions as well as determine if the training provided to staff was sufficient. The topics most commonly presented range from simple policy violations to suicidal ideation and sexual assault. Some of these weightier topics are likely to affect staff who either have personally dealt with the situation at hand or have concerns about their ability to effectively help other students in the future. Recognizing this challenge, it’s now common to have counselors present not only to help evaluate certain scenarios, but also to provide care to staff who may be affected by the experience.
The stress of the resident assistant position is not confined to training simulations, nor is it a new phenomenon. In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (February 21, 1990), author Susan Dodge posed the question, “Has the RA job grown too big for students?” Nearly 30 years later, campuses are still wrestling with this issue. In both an acknowledgment of the job-related stress an RA will be exposed to and as a way to prepare staff early on to deal with these stressors, counseling centers are frequently brought in during training to help RAs develop effective coping skills, design individualized self-care plans, and understand the secondary traumatic stress they may experience from helping others. Out of roughly 15 institutions contacted for this article, the majority of them provided mandatory training to resident assistants on secondary trauma or managing self-care within the role before the academic year began. Of those who did not, most others planned it as part of the training during the first six weeks.
Chris Gregory is the assistant director for residence life at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. cdgregor@uncg.edu Jennifer Whitney is the director of student health services counseling center at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. jmwhitne@uncg.edu
