For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This April 1983 piece goes inside Baylor’s counseling center, where a small staff of psychologists, counselors, and doctoral students serve roughly 600 students a year facing everything from test anxiety to relationship struggles. Featuring a candid firsthand account from one student’s year of counseling alongside insights from director Dr. Alice Ann Brunn, the article explores how the center balances short-term therapy, crisis intervention, and limited resources.
Staffed with one full-time psychologist, two part-time counselors and five doctoral students, the Baylor counseling service provides counseling for about six hundred students each year. The problems range from test anxiety to attempted suicide. The solutions are equally diverse. The counselors do not so much attempt to give solutions, as to help the students find solutions for themselves. Of course, not all students are happy with their treatment at the counseling center, but reports show that the overwhelming majority have been pleased with the results.
“I’m a different person now — well, not a different person. I’m the same person with a lot lifted off my back. I can function now,” said one student who spent a year in counseling at the University Health Center and was interviewed at length.
“I got to a point in my life where I knew things were messed up. I realized that something wasn’t right. A friend of mine came into lab talking about suicide,” she said. She immediately called the health center and asked a physician about how to deal with the situation. He made a few suggestions, and then scheduled an appointment for the friend. “I decided that as long as she was going in, I might as well too,” she said.
“It was very difficult for me. We talked about things that I hadn’t even allowed myself to think about.”
She described her experience as being different from many students’ because she had such a strong desire to change. “I was in such bad shape and I knew it. Some friends say counseling didn’t help them at all, but I think it’s because they didn’t want to change,” she said.
She referred to the joke about the lightbulb and the psychologist (“How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? One. But the lightbulb really has to want to change.”)
“That’s really true,” she said. “You have to hurt so much that you’re willing to do almost anything to change. I see people who hurt, but not enough to change the way they work. And the counselors can tell if you’re willing to work or not,” she said.
She described her own counselors as being excellent. “They listened, and they didn’t judge. You see, I felt as though I were no longer in control. I was depressed and didn’t see any way out of it. I could see that I was a very unhappy person. Counseling gave me a little bit of objectivity. The counselors told me that it was all right to feel hate and to be depressed. But they encouraged me to recognize the feelings and put them away, rather than to repress them.”
Now, after a year of counseling, she says, “I can take care of myself. I feel that I can function. I’m enjoying my work, classes, and boy friends.” This student said she concluded her counseling just before Christmas of 1982 because it was good timing. Her counselor was leaving, and she and he both thought they had reached a good point at which to terminate.
“I feel like, ’Rah, I made it through—I can make it through anything,’ It was really a good experience for me. I have a load lifted off my back.”
Dr. Alice Ann Brunn, director of the counseling center, said this is a typical counseling experience. “I would say that her experience is indicative of the kinds of cases we get each day,” Brunn said.
Most of the students come in because of emotional or social problems. About thirty percent come in for vocational counseling. The average number of visits per student is 3.5.
Brunn said some of the students come in simply because they are having problems with concentration or need to work on their study skills. However, she said Baylor doesn’t have as many students who come in with academically-related problems as most other schools throughout the country.
“We see a lot of relationship problems—roommates, friends, family, and identity,” she said. “There is a broad spectrum, but we don’t have many students who are seriously disturbed.”
However, each year counselors at the health center intervene before and after suicide attempts. Brunn said the number of crisis situations was particularly high in January of 1983. “It varies a lot from year to year,” she said. She said if a student is clearly suicidal, she tries to get the person referred for treatment with a private counselor. “Baylor’s counseling service is designed to provide short-term therapy. At the end of each year we refer students to counselors in the community.”
Most professional psychologists and psychiatrists charge on a sliding scale, which makes them affordable even to students, she said. And she explained that psychiatrists are able to prescribe drugs. “We’re not set up as a psychiatric hospital,” she said. However, at the health center doctors and counselors work very closely. “We often refer patients back and forth,” she said. Three of the physicians at the health center were formerly family practitioners. “So they are concerned with the psychological well-being of the patients, as well.”
Brunn now works part-time as director of the counseling services at Baylor’s health center and part-time as a private practitioner. After working on both sides of the fence, she said Baylor is actually “a microcosm of the kinds of problems that you meet in the public.”
“But in the private sector there isn’t as much crisis intervention work,” she said. “They almost all come on their own, whereas sometimes Baylor students are referred by professors or administrators.”
Brunn said about fifty percent of the students are referred and about fifty percent come on their own accord. “Since Baylor is a fairly close university, the stigma keeps some students from coming in,” she said.
The eight counselors see between twenty-five and thirty students each day, and Brunn said each of the counselors is “booked solid” each day. “We try to leave a few spots open to allow for crisis situations, and they are always taken,” she said. “In fact, today is the first day that I can remember having five minutes just to sit down and talk to someone since August.”
Brunn said the number of personnel puts the greatest limits on the counseling center. “I’m glad for this publicity,” she said, “but I’m afraid of what it might mean. We already see as many students as we can.” Brunn said recent studies report that schools should have one full-time counselor for every 1,500 to 2,000 students. After tallying the work weeks of all eight Baylor counselors, the university comes up somewhat short.
Brunn and the PsyD students, who comprise the bulk of the staff, each work about twenty hours each week. The students use this practicum experience toward their doctoral degree. Almost all of these students are in the third year of the doctoral program at Baylor. A few are in their second year.
PsyD student Kathy Dohoney, who has been counseling in the health center since July 1982, said she has been very pleased with her job. One of the things that she likes best is that the students are “bright, verbal, and willing to work on their problems.”
Kathy, who graduated from Baylor in ’79, said now that she is removed from the university setting a little bit more, she sees more of the social pressures that cause a student to conform. “Now that I’m out. I see how easy it is to get caught up in all of that,” she said.
Kathy describes the students who come into the center as “everyday people trying to cope with everyday problems. Some bring alcohol experience, test anxiety, depression, or girlfriend-boyfriend problems. Others bring more severe problems.”
After two years of graduate study, and former practicums in Waco, she said she feels adequately prepared to deal with these kinds of problems.
“There are standard things that I try to find out about each person, such as family relationships, history of peer relationships, and current stresses. The main thing I try to find out is how they’re functioning now,” she said. The rest of each session will vary according to the individual’s specific needs.
Kathy says she is a “significantly better counselor” than she was when she began her practicum in July. “My academic learning and clinical experience have prepared me to handle an internship,” she said. Kathy will begin as an intern for Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans in August. And in July five new PsyD students will begin at the health center.
‘Something inside made me want to whisper my name ’
I felt funny just calling to make the appointment. “I’d like to make an appointment to see a counselor, please.”
“Tomorrow I’m open at 10 and 2.”
“Better make that 2.”
“All rightee, can I have your name please?”
My name! Something inside me wanted to whisper even though no one else was around to hear.
“Nancy Roman,” I said softly.
“Okay, Nancy, that will be two o’clock Wednesday. Come to the front desk and we’ll show you where to go.”
We went through the usual phone courtesies and I hung up. “Why is there such a stigma attached to going to see a counselor?” I asked myself.
The next day I thought about the appointment often. Something about the fact that I was going to see a counselor made me feel a little unsure of myself. At the same time the idea was novel.
I had originally made the appointment so that I could see first-hand what the counseling services at Baylor are like. But after thinking about the situation I realized that this would be a good opportunity to discuss some things that were legitimately weighing on me as a senior in college — career decisions, mixed emotions about graduation, decisions about graduate school, where I would live . . .
Two o’clock came and I walked into the health center that I’d been to so many times before with the flu, poison ivy, a sprained ankle. But this visit was immediately different.
“I’m Nancy Roman — here for my two o’clock appointment,” I said to the lady at the front desk.
“Okay, Nancy, your counselor is Martha Hatch. She’s with a patient, but she’ll be with you in just a moment.”
It seemed as though she were shouting. I wanted to quiet her. But she carried on as though it were a routine checkup and promptly escorted me to the waiting room for “counseling patients.” That was when the difference became most apparent. I didn’t wait on the side of the waiting room where the patients who are physically sick wait. I waited on the opposite side of the waiting room — the smaller side . . . behind the desk . . . without the TV.
After a twenty-minute wait my name was called. “Nancy, Martha will see you now.” She motioned to a narrow staircase that spiraled down into the basement. Nothing could have fit the stereotype of the entrance into a psychiatric ward more perfectly. I went slowly down the steep stairs into the basement. The carpet was olive green and the walls were white. I walked to the end of the corridor and a middle- aged woman motioned me into her office. I was glad that she wasn’t younger.
“So, what are you here for, Nancy — testing?”
“No, I just wanted to talk about some things that were bothering me.”
“Okay, I’ll need to get a little background information on you first,” she said.
I filled out a one-page application requesting my name, rank, and family history. Then the “counseling” began. Actually, it was more of an I-talk-while-she-listens experience. I told her about my college experiences and the things that were facing me. She filled my pauses with short, probing questions.
Occasionally. I would reveal something that I had never verbalized before. I would be temporarily shocked at my own clear summary of the problem and would look up, expecting her to present me with the perfect solution.
At one point, when I was talking about finishing school and moving off on my own, away from both genetic and college families, I said: “I guess it’s not that I feel like I’ll need somebody, but just that I’ll want someone to need me — and there’s a good chance that no one will.”
That took a lot of courage for me to admit. I was surprised when her reaction was not one of triumph, as was mine. Not triumph in the problem, of course, but triumph both in recognizing the problem and then being able to verbalize it. In hindsight I realize that just that recognition was therapy in itself. Realizing that and then admitting it felt good to me.
I did and do consider myself to be a psychologically healthy person. But my session in counseling presented a good way for me to realize some of my own feelings.
I was glad that I went because I learned some things about myself and because it reduced, for me, the stigma of going to see a counselor. Despite the winding staircase and separate waiting area, I am hopeful that the negative connotations will diminish until a visit with a counselor becomes as routine at Baylor — and everywhere — as a checkup with a medical physician.
In the interim I am glad to see that the university has provided a service for those students who can catapult the stigma and take advantage of the service.
— Nancy Roman
