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Cosmopolitan November 2019The mental health wait time
a hit. I wouldn’t go out with friends. I’d
go to class, come home and lie in bed,
and not be able to sleep. Eventually, I
was like, I don’t want to do engineering
anymore, I hate this, I can’t do it, no one
believes in me, no one cares.” (Cooper
Union says student wellness is “an
important priority” and that its off-
campus providers are all “within walk-
ing distance or a short subway ride” of
its campus. The school says each stu-
dent gets six free counseling sessions
per year before insurance is billed.)
It was November 2016—five
long, painful weeks after
making that first call—when
Makai finally sat in the basement of
he r s cho ol ’s he a lt h c e nt e r a c r o s s f r om a
counselor. Just getting there felt like a
victory. When she told the woman
she’d been locking herself in her room
and cutting, the woman said, “I’m
sorry you had to go through that.
T h a t ’s r e a l ly h a r d .” For we e k s , Ma k a i
had been wondering if she was blowing
things out of proportion, wondering
why she couldn’t just deal. Now it all
sank in. You know what? she thought. It
has b e e n r e a l l y h ard.
For her, therapy wasn’t a magic
bullet, and she’d still face a weeks-long
wait to see a psychiatrist. But it did
make her feel hopeful for the first time
since getting to college—and put her
on the path to adjusting.
Some schools are finding creative
ways to get more students to that first
appointment. Arizona State University
has 72,000 students and, remarkably,
zero wait time, says Aaron Krasnow,
PhD, associate vice president of ASU’s
Health Services & Counseling Services.
Anyone who calls is seen that day,
“often the minute they walk in,” for as
lon g a s ne c e s s a r y—c ou ld b e 1 5 mi n -
utes, could be an hour and a half. This
appointment feels like a real session,
not an intake call, which is all some
students require.
“Some people just need help having
a conversation with a professor or with
their financial aid, or they just need to
unload something that’s on their
mind,” says Krasnow. When students
like this end up languishing on waiting
lists, it “creates a logjam for all.”
Krasnow believes wait times can be
eliminated—and if they haven’t been,
that’s evidence that stigma still per-
sists around mental health. Which is
why more and more students are
demanding change. When word spread
that the University of Maryland had a
wait time of 30-plus days, the student
group Scholars Promoting and Revital-
izing Care launched the hashtag
#30DaysTooLate, which landed the
issue on the local news. At Stockton
University in New Jersey, Julie, 21,
after having to wait for up to a month
between appointments, met with the
student senate and lobbied adminis-
trators to hire more counselors. (Stock-
ton, like other schools, won’t comment
on individual cases, but a spokesper-
son said, “Crisis-intervention services
are available immediately as needed.
The counseling center has daily walk-
in hours for meetings with counselors
and offers a web-based program called
Therapy Assistance Online.”)
And at Northeastern University in
Boston, Kavita, 23, helped start the
group Students Working for an Acces-
sible Northeastern, which drafted a list
of mental health demands, including
more counselors. As a sophomore,
Kavita had been nearly snowed under
by sadness. “Depression is like an
emptiness—a void,” she says. At one
point, she wondered, What if I just took
a few too many pills? But when she tried
to book therapy, “it was always in three
to four weeks,” she says. And it wasn’t
just what the clinic was telling her, it
was the way they were telling her. “I felt
like my issue didn’t matter,” she says.
(A spokesperson for Northeastern says,
“We recognize that this is an area
where we have room for improvement
in order to provide the best care for our
global community. This year, we are
making significant investments to
enhance our in-house staffing and
resources as well as partnering with
organizations to provide 24/7 care and
appropriate referrals.”)Goodman believes that better follow-
up can ensure that wait-listed students
a t le a s t k now t he s cho ol i s t r y i n g t o
get them help. After seeing one of
her students being turned away by the
campus mental health clinic, she
believes staff should receive training
“so that every interaction for a student
w i l l b e p o s it ive , p a r t ic u l a rly i n a s e n s i-
tive moment.”
Nance Roy, a professor of psychiatry
a t Ya le S cho ol of Me d ic i ne a nd ch ie f
clinical officer of the Jed Foundation,
which works to strengthen mental
health among teens and young adults,
agrees every interaction is crucial. “We
work with schools to create a culture of
caring and compassion, where there is
no wrong door for a student to walk
through to get support,” she says.It’s now been three years since
Makai was a freshman at
Ithaca. In that time, the school
has hired two more counselors, added
daily crisis hours, and installed an
on-call counselor who’s available by
phone 24/7 whenever the counseling
center is closed. It has also streamlined
the intake-call process that had added
two weeks to Makai’s wait.
Since most of these changes are new,
it remains to be seen whether they’ll
bring down wait times, says Rosanna
Ferro, PhD, who was appointed vice
president for student affairs and
campus life in 2017. “We’re not always
going to have it a hundred percent
right,” she says. “But it’s critical for us
to get as close to perfect as possible.”
Now a senior, Makai joined her local
chapter of Active Minds, helping other
students who struggle to stand up for
themselves. And she’s stayed friends
with that same once-intimidating
crew, btw—only now they are her
support system, not a source of stress.
“I think if I’d had help early on,
I would have known better ways to
handle the situations I was in,”
she says, “which is what I did eventu-
ally learn from the counselor. But
in the in-between time, I was kind of
j u s t le f t t o fe nd for my s e l f.”Continued from page 119*Additional reporting by Natasha Jokic