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Lean on Me
When personal problems intrude on their lives, Yale undergraduates are no different from any other people their age. The University has an official safety net, but the students themselves are often the best source of help.
March 1996
by Annie Murphy Paul
An undergraduate’s career at Yale may be for some the “shortest, gladdest years of life” celebrated in song, but for others the period can be one of upheaval and confusion. The pain of leaving home and family, the stresses and pressures of college life, and the difficulty of establishing an adult identity can sometimes seem insurmountable.
Indeed, college students are in the age group statistically at high risk for drug overdoses, sexual assault, automobile and other accidents, and sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS. And the anxiety that comes with the new freedoms and new responsibilities of college life can itself provoke a wide range of negative behavior. Yale’s substance abuse consultants treat and counsel undergraduates for everything from binge drinking to addiction. (Precise statistics on the rates of substance abuse here are not available.) Eating disorders—which are often linked to stress and to a perfectionistic, overachieving personality type—affect perhaps 5 percent of the University’s female undergraduates, according to Kelly Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders. Depression, anxiety, and interpersonal problems are also common. In the most serious cases, says Dr. Sheila Woody, director of the Yale Psychological Services Clinic, students may have a genetic predisposition to mental illness that requires a stressor to activate it, and leaving home for college can be just such an emotional trigger. “A lot of problems emerge for the first time at Yale,” says Woody.
But aid is almost always close at hand. From chaplains to coaches, psychologists to peer counselors, Yale for most undergraduates is rife—if not with pleasure, then with people ready to help.
Many of them are on the staff of the University Health Services Center’s Mental Hygiene department. Founded in 1925 under the auspices of President James Rowland Angell, the clinic, originally located in the Medical School, was one of the first at an American university. Students of Yale College and the Sheffield Scientific School could avail themselves of the services of Arthur Ruggles, a Rhode Island doctor trained in what was then the radical new practice of psychotherapy. “Yale has a long tradition of valuing mental health services,” says Dr. Lorraine Siggins, chief of Mental Hygiene for six years and now acting director of Yale Health Services.
Located since 1971 in the Health Services Center on Hillhouse Avenue, the successor to Ruggles’s solitary practice has evolved into today’s staff of 21 psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and clinical social workers, including specialists in substance abuse and sex counseling. Mental Hygiene remains one of the most popular choices of students seeking guidance, helping about 10 percent of the undergraduate population each year with both crisis situations and long-term, less urgent problems. They can join a therapy group, led by a psychologist, or attend a limited number of individual therapy sessions—usually 12 to 16 weeks at most (although those with very serious problems may continue indefinitely). Students who need more specialized help, or who have relatively mild difficulties but nonetheless wish to continue therapy, may go to one of Yale’s several psychological clinics, or to a private therapist in the New Haven area.
Students who desire counseling of a less clinical sort may turn to Yale’s informal network of care providers. Freshman counselors and ethnic counselors are College seniors who live with a contingent of freshmen on Old Campus, or in Timothy Dwight and Silliman colleges. Every first-year student is assigned a freshman counselor, who acts as an informal adviser and link to the college dean. A group of 12 freshman counselors provides support to minority freshmen. Coaches, too, often act as counselors and confidants to their athletes, offering advice on matters beyond the bounds of the playing field. Students who seek counseling of a religious nature—and even some who don’t—may visit one of a dozen chaplains, pastors, and rabbis associated with Yale, who represent faiths from Lutheran to Mormon, from Jewish to Baptist. “The problems that we see here are no different from those the therapists see at Mental Hygiene,” says the Rev. Frederick J. Streets, the University Chaplain. “It’s just that some people have trouble going to a psychiatrist.” College deans and masters can also be called upon for counsel.
And yet many students, troubled by events within or without, don’t turn to adults at all, but to fellow students known as peer counselors. Yale has four peer counseling groups. The oldest is Walden, a phone hotline and walk-in clinic founded in 1972 and intended to help students with any kind of problem. Pathways, established in 1989, provides a hotline staffed by gay, lesbian, and bisexual students. Consent, a hotline and outreach group for victims of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment, was created four years ago, after a rape crisis hotline called RESPONSE folded. The youngest of the services is ECHO, or Eating Concerns Hotline and Outreach, set up in 1994. Although all peer counselors consult with an adviser from Mental Hygiene, and often refer their callers to the department, the students involved in these groups choose their own members, arrange for their own training, and volunteer their own time to help other students in distress.
The groups' prospective counselors—who are solicited through notices in the college dining halls, posters, and advertisements in the Daily News—are subjected to a rigorous interview and application process. Students who wish to become counselors with Consent, for example, must pass a 20-essay take-home test; those applying to Walden must perform two lengthy role-plays before an audience.
In selecting new counselors, members of peer counseling groups look for “people with good listening skills and body language, who ask good questions and have good instincts,” says one of Walden’s two coordinators. The groups also seek students who are nonjudgmental, and who can keep strong political feelings out of their counseling. “We have very few problems with counselors, because the group does such a careful job in the application process,” says Dr. Roberta Isleib, Walden’s Mental Hygiene adviser.
After counselors are chosen, they undergo an intense training session before the start of school, followed by continued instruction throughout the year. The training, arranged by a student coordinator in consultation with an adviser, includes lessons in basic counseling skills and lectures by experts in particular fields. “The more training you get, the more comfortable you feel on the phone,” says a Walden coordinator. Isleib adds that “like anything else, you get better with practice. I see the group mature over the year into more confident and more skilled counselors.” Veteran counselors are encouraged to attend additional training sessions each year, to refresh their techniques and to share their experiences with newcomers.
Yale College requires every peer counseling group to have a Mental Hygiene adviser like Isleib, and to register with the Dean’s office. Last year, Walden and Consent each received small grants from the office (which makes its funding decisions through a student committee). The cost of running a peer counseling group, say coordinators, is quite low; their largest expense by far is publicity. The University also provides peer counseling groups with offices on campus, and helps them find furniture and office equipment. Despite such links to the administration, however, the peer counseling groups are legally autonomous entities, separate from the University.
Assistant Dean of Yale College Philip Greene concedes that “a degree of liability exists by virtue of our providing University space to peer counseling groups, registering them, getting Mental Hygiene involved—but that’s not the reason we set guidelines. We want them to be good counselors.” For the most part, he says, Yale administrators have confidence in the ability of students to help each other along. “All the counselors I have met are very committed to what they do,” says Greene. “They realize they’re dealing with matters of great significance and it’s important to them to do it right.”
When students place a call to the Consent hotline, or walk into Walden’s basement office, they are greeted by counselors who have been trained not to make judgments or give advice, but simply to listen, ask questions, and offer information. The problems brought to peer counseling may be as mild as an argument with a roommate, or as serious as a threat of suicide; calls last a few minutes, or most of the night. “We try to get at the feelings first, find out what kind of emotions are involved,” says a Walden counselor. “We ask a lot of questions and do a lot of paraphrasing, reflecting what they’ve said back to them.” At the end of a call or visit, says the counselor, “we might ask them a fantasy question: 'What would be the best possible outcome of this situation?', or we might suggest that they consider talking to a professional.”
Acting as a source for referrals, in fact, is one of the peer counseling groups' most important functions. Each organization has an extensive resource file listing contacts at the University and in the New Haven community. The peer counseling groups are designed to offer one-time help only; their counselors are not trained to be therapists, and a rotating schedule of counselors means that a caller would not be assured of talking to the same person, should he or she call again. But for many students, once is enough. “Sometimes people are confused and just want to figure out what’s happening and what it means,” says Emily Woglom '96, the cocoordinator of Consent. “We provide a safe environment where they can do that.”
Callers to Consent are assured of speaking with a fellow undergraduate, immersed in the common culture of Yale College. Says Woglom: “If a caller tells me, 'I think my T.A. [teaching assistant] is coming on to me, and I don’t know what to do,' then I know what that situation would be like. I know where she’s coming from.” Because Consent focuses on sexual assault, abuse, and harassment, its counselors are always knowledgeable about, and sympathetic to, the problems of their callers. They take special pains to be sensitive to the needs of victims, allowing only female counselors to answer the hotline (although male counselors are available on request.)
Some students choose to call a peer hotline like Consent or ECHO not for its intimacy, but for its anonymity. Students threatened by the idea of a face-to-face encounter with a therapist might feel more comfortable calling the ECHO hotline, where they won’t know to whom they are talking, and won’t have to reveal their own identity. For those suffering from eating disorders, which are often shrouded in shame and secrecy, such total anonymity is particularly attractive. (The most common type of disorder, bulimia, involves a binge-and-purge cycle of eating, while a rarer form, anorexia, denotes a body image so distorted that it leads its sufferers to starve themselves.) “People with eating disorders are often reluctant to admit they have a problem, and reluctant to seek help,” says Jackie Raetz '96, coordinator of ECHO. “Calling a peer counselor can seem like a manageable step.” Many counselors say they regard peer counseling as an intermediate step between no help and professional psychotherapy. (The Mental Hygiene department can have a waiting list of as long as a few months for those not in crisis situations, and peer counseling can help fill in the gap.)
Surprisingly, perhaps, the majority of peer counselors are not psychology majors, nor do most plan to go into the mental health field after they graduate. Some have a friend or relative who has had to deal with an eating disorder or sexual harassment. Others feel committed to a particular cause. Dr. Isleib notes that hotline volunteers “often have reasons within themselves for counseling—perhaps that’s the role they played in their family.” And some counselors are attracted to the service out of a curiosity about their own thoughts and feelings. “In counseling people, you learn a lot about yourself and about human nature,” says a Walden coordinator.
The hotlines demand a significant investment of time and energy on the part of peer counselors, some of whom answer calls for up to ten hours a week and attend two or more hours of weekly meetings and training sessions. The 23 counselors involved in Walden, the only peer hotline open every night, take on a two-and-a-half hour phone and walk-in counseling shift once a week (each shift is done in pairs). Two or three times a semester, they answer hotline calls from 1 to 8 a.m., and as frequently enlist for what they call a “grand slam”—a five-hour shift on both a Friday and a Saturday night.
Walden counselors often form close bonds with each other through the long hours spent in twos and surrounded by intense emotion. They are free to talk about their responses to callers with their fellow volunteers. (Because names are not revealed during counseling, the confidentiality of callers is not compromised; however, cases are never discussed outside the counseling group.) By discussing a call with other volunteers, Walden counselors get feedback on how others might have handled the situation, and release some of the emotions that a call might evoke. “We encourage our volunteers to get to know each other, because the counselors themselves often need a support system to deal with their feelings,” says a Walden coordinator.
But counselors must be careful, the coordinator says, not to take too much responsibility for the fate of their callers. “You have to cultivate a certain kind of detachment,” she explains. “Once the person hangs up the phone, there’s nothing more you can do.” Emily Woglom of Consent notes that counseling survivors of sexual assault can be “very moving. What keeps it from being depressing and upsetting is that our role in helping them is a very positive one,” she says. “And it means a lot that so many of us care enough to do this.”
So many, in fact, that plans are underway to create a coalition of peer group coordinators to share information and collaborate on fundraising and promotional efforts. A student-run coalition, called Safety Net, existed once before, but it disbanded in 1994 when its founder graduated. Now, says Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg, plans are being made for a more continuous, more permanent organization, to be run by the Dean’s office.
Like Safety Net, peer counseling groups go in and out of existence or periodically reinvent themselves; their survival depends on a delicate balance of caller demand and counselor enthusiasm. The Pathways hotline, for example, was out of commission for the first semester of this year. Counselors for the service, now up and running again, attribute its temporary shut-down to several causes. “Pathways was started six years ago by a group of very dynamic, very enthusiastic people, who put a lot of energy into it and got a lot of calls,” says Maryanne Ludwig '97, a Pathways coordinator. When the founders graduated, there were few people prepared to take their place, and the organization faltered. Pathways has also had to adjust its offerings to the changing needs of its constituents. “It’s much easier to come out here now than it was even a few years ago,” says Gowri Ramachandran '98, another coordinator. “So we’ve expanded the focus of the service to cover any issue a gay, lesbian, or bisexual person might be dealing with.” Likewise, the founding of ECHO in 1994 was a response to the rising incidence of eating and weight disorders on Yale’s campus. “ECHO has grown and grown in size, and has continued past the graduation of its founders, which is a good sign that it’s meeting a real need,” says Kelly Brownell.
Although the influence of changing social conditions on peer counseling groups can give them the appearance of instability, much of the value of these groups lies in their very flexibility: They are able to adapt themselves quickly to the needs of the students they serve.
Those needs—for reassurance, support, and guidance—may be met by any number of adult counselors at Yale. But students who choose to speak to a peer counselor may also be seeking something else: the recognition of a common struggle for self-definition. As a sign for one of the hotlines puts it, “You are not alone.”  |
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