Chris Campbell: UCLA must provide alternative mental health services

College is hard. Exams, homework, extracurricular activities and work cause everyone stress. But for students with mental illness, it can be debilitating.

That’s what makes UCLA Counseling and Psychological Services, or CAPS, such a valuable resource on campus. CAPS is the main psychological treatment center on campus and provides services such as individual and group therapy sessions, workshops, psychiatric evaluation and treatment.

But CAPS is facing a problem. As demand for treatment services has increased, the center has found itself increasingly understaffed. As a result, students can wait up to a month for appointments. In an effort to reduce these ridiculous wait times, CAPS has decided to limit each student to six free visits per academic year, down from 10 last year.

Interim executive director Nicole Green’s rationale is understandable: Offering fewer sessions will help CAPS process students faster and create more vacancies. At large schools such as UCLA – with a population of just under 30,000 – students who seek counseling go to a median of 5.91 counseling sessions per academic year, according to a survey by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. Going strictly by the numbers, cutting the number of sessions seems reasonable.

But reducing the maximum number of appointments shouldn’t be the answer. Students who need continued treatment can’t get it at CAPS and have difficulty getting it elsewhere. Either CAPS must find a way to accommodate these students further, or they must find viable treatment elsewhere. If left unresolved, these mental health issues can intensify and may become full-blown disorders.

CAPS processes students with all sorts of issues. Many students without mental illness will seek counseling to cope with stress stemming from relationships, school and identity issues. These are lower level cases and they typically don’t use all six sessions.

Then there are students who have mental disorders such as depression or anxiety. In their less severe forms, these issues don’t pose a direct threat to a student’s safety, but if left untreated it can snowball and develop into a more severe mental illness. These “middle cases” don’t need to drop out of school or seek intensive psychiatric treatment, but they do need a trained professional to talk to once a week.

Students without severe psychological disorders who exceed their six appointments at CAPS may receive a referral to Behavioral Health Services in the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, which is designed as a more intensive, long-term alternative to CAPS. Like CAPS, BHS does great work and is an invaluable campus resource for students with severe mental illnesses like borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder.

But BHS is facing its own problems with demand, staffing and wait times, which can reach up to two months. BHS spots need to be reserved for the students who need them most. So middle cases end up getting shut out of on-campus treatment.

After their sessions are up, some middle cases will seek counseling services off campus. However, this can be very inconvenient, and it puts unnecessary strain on students seeking treatment. This is why on-campus resources are so valuable.

Issues like depression and anxiety are entirely treatable – and early treatment will prevent them from intensifying and becoming something else entirely. But they need continuous treatment in order for that to happen. They can’t be limited to two sessions per quarter followed by the possibility of a monthlong wait time to get into BHS.

The obvious solution to this problem would be to increase CAPS funding. Indeed, funding is going in the right direction. Last January, the UC Board of Regents voted to increase the Student Service Fee by 5 percent every year, starting this year, with half of the extra fee to be used for mental health services. This will allow CAPS to hire more counselors and will go a long way toward reducing wait times. However, as student observer to the Committee on Health Services Alexander Hill noted, this allocation is grossly inadequate given the rapid increase of demand for counseling services: Since 2006, the number of students seeking counseling has increased by 37 percent.

Until more funding is assigned, CAPS finds itself in a catch-22: either reduce the number of sessions offered, or subject students to increasingly long wait times.

And it’s not their fault. The priority should be with reducing wait times as much as possible so students can get the help they need. There needs to be a way for CAPS to decrease wait times for students seeking treatment without reducing the overall number of appointments for middle and serious level cases.

My colleague Opinion columnist Shani Shahmoon has advocated peer support groups as a way to alleviate demand for CAPS counselors, something that I wholeheartedly agree with. It would grant students the long term treatment and support they need while lightening the burden that the CAPS counselors face. The program needs to be CAPS-sanctioned with properly trained peer advisers able to give students necessary support for lower level cases. By moving these students away from CAPS, the counselors will have more time to provide counseling to middle cases and help severe cases transition more quickly into BHS. CAPS must create these groups if they want to truly address the overwhelming demand for their services.

Even if CAPS continues to struggle with the bottleneck of students seeking appointments, students with mental illness also have another immediate resource on campus: advocacy groups such as Active Minds and the UCLA Healthy Campus Initiative. These groups mainly focus on increasing awareness of mental issues and fighting their associated stigmas but can also provide a safe and supportive environment for students to discuss their issues and open up to those around them. They shouldn’t serve as a replacement for counseling, but for many students struggling with depression, anxiety and other issues, a supportive community can make a huge difference for their well-being.

The demand for counseling needs to be met, with or without CAPS. Students with mental illness have so much potential to succeed. But they need support, they need help and they need access to psychological resources worthy of one of the world’s top universities.