Counselling service warns of significant delays in service

Warwick students have been advised that they must wait nearly a month to receive a one-to-one session with the University’s counselling service.

A third year student, who sought counselling, informed the Boar that she would have the next available appointment would be a matter of “weeks”.

Preferring to remain anonymous, the student added that it had taken several days for the service to reply to her registration request.

On the University’s website, students are informed that “If you register for face-to-face counselling today an appointment will be available for you in approximately 26 days.”

However, the University has defended the long waiting time.

University Communications Officer Kelly Parkes-Harrison said, “this stage of the academic year is one of the busiest times for the University’s counselling services. If a student needs a more immediate response, we have the email counselling service which guarantees a response within a week.”

In addition to online resources, she also noted that students can quickly join “therapeutic groups” and “workshops which are continually revised to meet the common needs of students”.

This is in contrast to some other institutions such as Bristol University, which offers weekly drop-in sessions and advises students to phone them in an emergency.

However,Parkes-Harrison claimed that the University offered “appropriate support” from a wide range of other services if students are in urgent need of attention.

“A crisis might be helped by a visit to a GP, personal tutor, resident tutor, mental health co-ordinator, Director of Student Support and his team, the Chaplaincy, the Senior Tutor, or the Advice and Welfare team in the Student’s Union.”

She added that Warwick’s Counselling Service had already piloted several different schemes, including emergency drop-in sessions.

“It was found that they were either not used and in that case prevented someone from having a counselling session or that they were perhaps used inappropriately and people then have to be signposted to another form of help.”

The University also claims on its counselling website that 32 per cent of students say that they have overcome their crisis by the time an appointment becomes available.

Rather than an issue of long waiting times, this was sometimes because “they had found help from one of the other support services available in the University or from family and friends”, Parkes-Harrison said.

Counselling is “part of the student support network and is a specific way of helping that is not appropriate for all difficulties.”

The Students’ Union’s Welfare Officer Steph Jones supports the University’s position.

Jones, when asked whether it was deplorable that students must wait almost a month for a face-to-face appointment, said, “It is not ideal and there are possibly ways of improving it but I believe the counselling service provides an excellent service to students with the resources it has.”

She believed that “in an ideal world” the University would provide emergency counselling but achieving this was “not a quick and simple task”, reiterating the University’s position that Counselling service was “just one element” of the support network provided at Warwick.

The University said it is “constantly monitoring the support it provides”.

It is also planning to look at the establishment of a specific “Cognitive Behavioural Therapy group for those with mild to moderate depression”.