College students to help meet peersĀ“ mental health needs

With college mental health services garnering criticism since the Virginia Tech tragedy, Isabelle Burtan believes local universities have a valuable, yet underutilized, mental health resource close at hand. Just look no further than the college students t

As project director at the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Greater Chicago, Burtan is leading a charge to build studentrun, mental health peercounseling programs at area colleges. And students at Northwestern University are pioneers in the effort. "There’s no way to ignore that college students have a lot of issues and are experiencing a really tough time in their lives.

On top of that, it’s an age of onset for serious mental illness, 18 to 24. It’s a time when they might be noticing symptoms in themselves, symptoms in someone around them," said Burtan. In fact, a 2004 survey of 1,026 college students conducted for NAMI and Abbott Laboratories found that one-third of college students reported symptoms of serious mental illness, hence the start of the NAMI of Chicago College Outreach Program.

Instrumental in building the peer-counseling program from the ground up is Caroline Kulczuga, a 21-year-old senior at Northwestern. She has worked closely with Burtan and other volunteers to model the program after Room 13, a staple of Harvard University’s mental health service for more than 30 years.

"We wanted to create something that was really plastic that you could mold to a certain school’s needs," said Kulczuga, a psychology major. Kulczuga makes it clear that peer-counselors are not meant to replace the work of professionals. "What we do is very different from what a professional counselor does. We do not give advice and we do not diagnose. Our training is designed to create really empathetic listeners," said Kulczuga.

College students sometimes fail to take advantage of mental health services on campus, Burtan said, because they are intimidated by the idea of seeking the help of a professional. Peer-counseling seeks to close that gap as a safe, confidential entry point for students.

"There’s general agreement that when students are isolated and in emotional pain, they may be at greater risk," said Ariel Phillips, one of Room 13’s supervisors and a counselor/psychologist at Harvard. "Sometimes they want to talk to one of their own. It’s not a stigmatizing thing to go talk to their peers," she said. Dennis Watson, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Loyola, said that as an instructor, he’s seen students who’ve suffered from unavoidable life problems.

Of one student who had suffered the loss of a loved one, he said, "She didn’t have a mental health diagnosis problem, she had stress going on." Yet the student avoided seeking formal help from a professional counselor because she thought she would have to be diagnosed with something in order to receive reimbursement. "It would’ve been nice to have something like NCCOP to refer her to," Watson said.

To learn more about NCCOP or to seek NAMI-Greater Chicago’s services, call (312) 563-0445.

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