NORTHAMPTON — In 2014, Smith College student Sylvie Nemeth was suffering from a serious eating disorder. In addition to a treatment plan outside the college, she said, her doctor prescribed weekly therapy visits at Smith’s Counseling Service — something the college initially told her was possible.
But in reality, Nemeth said she was only able to book appointments every three or four weeks — a development that deeply troubled her.
“Especially when you’re recovering from an eating disorder, a lot happens in three or four weeks,” Nemeth said this week. She said she also had to wait more than three months to get an appointment with the psychiatrist.
After a few months, Nemeth said, the college recommended that she go off campus for therapy, and gave her a two-page list of Northampton therapists who accept Smith’s insurance. She said she called all of them, and only one was actually accepting new patients.
Eventually, she was able to recover from her eating disorder, and she said the support Smith’s counseling service provided her was first-class. But talking to her classmates, she said, she worries that those same wait times she endured are more widespread.
“Most people with mental health issues are really reluctant to get treatment, so if they encounter barriers like that they throw in the towel,” she said.
Nemeth is one of 1,066 people, including about 740 students, who have signed a petition demanding the college address what the petition describes as wait times of up to a month to receive counseling at Smith. As of early Wednesday, 110 petition signers indicated they or someone they know has experienced those delays, according to sophomore Amelia Windorski, who organized the petition drive. Windorski’s letter praises the work that the counseling service does, and urges Smith to steer more focus, funding and staff in its direction.
“One month can be the difference between dropping out and passing one’s classes; more gravely, it can be the difference between life and death,” Windorski, a psychology major, wrote in the petition. “While the Counseling Service does a fantastic job of prioritizing critical cases with emergency appointments, we believe fewer mental health crises would occur if students had access to long term mental health care.”
Smith has approximately 2,500 students, 33 percent of whom use the school’s counseling services, officials said.
In an email, Kristin Evans, Counseling Service associate director, stated that Smith employs one full-time and one part-time psychiatrist, four licensed psychotherapists and two part-time clinicians, along with four master’s level interns and an associate director who provides clinical services. That is more than twice the average number of counseling staff for four-year colleges of comparable size, Evans said.
Donna Lisker, Smith College’s dean and vice president for campus life, said in an email that Smith has seen a “slow, steady increase in demand for counseling and psychiatry services in recent years.” To address that surge, she said, Smith has recently hired new staff, and is working on a strategic plan to address students’ needs.
Smith is not alone in seeing increased demand for counseling services. Windorski’s petition comes at a time when colleges and universities across the country are grappling with that very issue.
From 2010 to 2015, the average level of counseling center use increased 30 percent while average enrollment grew by only 5 percent, according to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, a Penn State University network that collects data from more than 400 college and university counseling centers. What’s more, “threat-to-self” characteristics — defined as non-suicidal self-injury and serious suicidal ideation — increased for the sixth year in a row, according to the organization’s 2016 report.
“Counseling centers are providing 28 percent more ‘rapid-access’ service hours per client and 7.6 percent fewer ‘routine’ service hours per client over the last six years,” that latest report reads.
Though preliminary, the report states, these findings suggest that counseling centers are shifting their responses to deal with higher-risk situations, and that routine treatment is less available.
Adding to that picture, Lisker said smaller schools tend to have a higher demand for counseling services, partly because those students are more aware of available services and are more willing to ask for them.
“I don’t think there is a college in the country that feels it has completely sufficient mental health resources, based on conversations I have with my peers,” Lisker wrote.
“Everyone is seeing an increase in both demand and acuity. The question then becomes how to best serve our students and how to think about service delivery beyond individual therapy.”
To address those concerns, she said that in the last four years Smith has added a second psychiatrist and therapist, has increased hours for existing staff, hired a predoctoral fellow for diversity and inclusion, is putting more focus on group therapy, and last year began offering acupuncture.
But Windorski said she experienced long wait times herself last year. And, as someone who is open with colleagues and friends about her own use of therapy, she has had many Smith students tell her about their own struggles waiting to get in the door to see a counselor this year.
“Coming back this year, the situation was especially bad,” she said. “Just talking to my therapist, I realized there was not going to be as much availability because so many people were requesting counseling services.”
In response to questions about the petition’s allegations, Lisker said students in emergency situations “never wait,” though students in more routine situations do after an initial evaluation. She added that students requesting routine initial counseling and psychiatry appointments are currently being booked for the week of Oct. 31.
“According to professional organizations in the mental health field, this two-week wait time is consistent with industry standards at peer institutions,” she wrote. “In the next few weeks, we’ll be implementing a new triage system that will allow us to reduce the wait time even more.”
Lisker also said the college is investing in the Jed Foundation program — a nonprofit that seeks to help educational institutions protect the emotional health of teenagers and young adults, and works to prevent suicide.
“Through this program, Jed will help us gather baseline data on student needs and college services, develop a strategic plan, and then implement that plan,” she said.
For students like Windorski and those who signed her petition, the issue is that funding should be directed to hiring more staff on campus.
“I really think that everyone in counseling is doing the best they can. It’s a resource problem,” she said. “We need to prioritize this and work collaboratively on solutions.”
Lisker said that if the Jed Foundation recommends a staffing increase after its audit of Smith’s mental health services, the college will consider doing so “within the financial constraints of the college budget.”
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.