Student Complaints Leveled at Counseling Services

Students have recently been disappointed with the level of mental health care provided by SUNY Geneseo. The disappointment shows a disconnect between students’ expectations and the reality of the counseling services on campus, and students are feeling unheard and misunderstood as a result.

The Student Health and Counseling (SHC) department, located in the Lauderdale Health Center, addresses students’ physical and mental health problems, as well as the college’s medical concerns such as COVID testing. Within SHC, Counseling Services provides professional help with “a wide variety of mental health and personal concerns,” according to the Geneseo website. 

On the Geneseo website, Counseling Services outlines the scope of their treatment. 

“We are committed to maintaining our ability to provide students with high quality, appropriate behavioral health services. We provide mental health services within the limits of our expertise (as required by professional ethics).  As generalist therapists, we are similar to primary care physicians: we are able to address a wide variety of presenting issues, yet there are some concerns which require specialized treatment services that we do not offer.”  

In an email interview with Assistant Director of Counseling Services Beth Cholette, Cholette explained that Counseling Services “typically provide short-term intervention. [Counseling Services] focuses on providing the best care possible within our scope of services. Similar to both Health Services and other college counseling centers, we provide referrals in cases where we determine that a student's needs would be best met by another service or agency.”

While the college’s Counseling Service focuses on short-term intervention and care, many students who have utilized the service feel that their expectations were not met, and that the solutions that the Counseling Service offered were not sufficient.  

An anonymous student who asked to be quoted as “K” explained that when they went to the Health Center for counseling, they were told the issues primarily handled by the counseling center included “test or assignment anxiety or an event that happened on campus [that affects a group of the student body],” and that the college could not provide them with the counseling services that they needed.

K said, “I was pretty frustrated [at the school] with the whole situation. I've had great experiences on the health side of Lauderdale, but I got in contact with someone [from Counseling Services] and they said, ‘We can't help you. You are too traumatized.’ Being turned away for an issue that you're having is probably not the best way to make an impression on someone.”

K was directed to online websites to find independent counseling services that were more capable of providing the type of mental health care that they needed. 

This type of deflection is common among student’s accounts of their experiences at Counseling Services. As a result, Counseling Services has garnered a negative reputation on campus. An anonymous student who asked to be quoted as “J” confirmed that the reputation of the college’s counseling affected their expectation of the care that was going to be provided. 

“I had already heard some horror stories about it, so I was certainly not expecting anything overwhelmingly great. I was hoping for a kind of short-term thing where over a couple of weeks I could meet a few times with a person.” 

In the same fashion as K, J was referred to online resources to find their own independent counseling service that could handle the type of long-term mental health care that they needed.  “I went there, and they asked a couple very basic questions before directing me to Psychology Today,” said J.

The poor reputation and disappointment that many students have expressed have led to a negative stigma surrounding the Counseling Services.  

According to Cholette, the pandemic has left many students searching for more mental health help than past years. However, many students like K and J have been unable to find any resources on campus, despite the fact that students’ tuition funds the Lauderdale Health Center and the offices housed within it.

Students suggested options for change that may make Counseling Services more useful and attractive to students on and off campus. Many suggested increasing the number of staff in the counseling center. 

K suggested, “I feel like the school in general just needs to hire more people to help with mental health, because as it is they just can't accept everybody and it's awful how they have to turn people away like that. So, I don't think it's necessarily 100% their fault, but it definitely could’ve been handled better. In college, mental health is a huge aspect; physical and mental health carry the same weight in your life. I know, like, budgets are limited and all that jazz, but it might be worth expanding a budget to help people.”

Other possibilities include taking into account what kind of care Geneseo students need and making that the focus of the Counseling Services, as opposed to the current model of short-term, academic-focused care. 

J said “[Counseling Services could improve by] spending more time actually listening to what each student needs. Maybe if they spent a bit more time or listened a little better, they would have understood better what I was looking for. I'd say to Geneseo, ‘try to better understand what students actually need.’”