In light of dramatically increasing demand for mental health care on-campus and nationwide, University administrators have elected to make major changes to the structure of mental health services provided at Tufts.
Currently, students may seek out mental health care from two different sources. The Counseling Center offers advice and therapy to students with problems related to family, academics, sexuality, relationships and other matters.
Alternatively, the mental health care division of the University Health Service deals with psychiatric problems and may prescribe psychiatric medication.
The two services will merge into one entity.
"There will now be one Mental Health Service staff under one director," Dean of Student Services Paul Stanton said.
The change was decided upon after nearly a year of meetings between the Health Service and the Counseling Executive Board.
Jonathan Slavin, Director of the Counseling Center, said that "there are potential advantages, and there may be potential disadvantages" to the changes.
The unification of the psychiatric and psychological aspects can be beneficial for the process, Director of Tufts' Health Service Michelle Bowdler said.
"What the research really shows is that therapy is helpful, and psychopharmacology can also be helpful, but that really the combination of the two is the most helpful," she said.
The merger will allow for greater coordination among mental health staff.
"Everybody will be working together; we'll have a cohesive and coherent staff and approach to health problems on campus," Slavin said.
"In this day and age, we think we can better serve and meet the needs of the student population with these changes," Stanton said. "People expect a certain level with the high price tags of schools."
According to Stanton, an increased number of personnel is necessary to keep up with the volume of cases.
"We have to deal with the increase in foot traffic [and] with the increase in the complexity of cases seen," he said. "It's about putting more experienced people on the front lines."
While administrators laud the potential improvements coming from the modified service, some worry that the personal attention that the Counseling Center offered may be lost due to an increased focus on short-term counseling and referrals to outside providers.
Stanton refuted that concern, however.
"We don't anticipate any major change in short-term counseling," he said. "We don't provide 100 percent of counseling and psychotherapy on campus - that's true now, and it'll be true next year. It's true for virtually every other college."
But Assistant Professor of Education Steven Luz-Alterman, who is also an independently practicing psychologist, has reservations about the upcoming changes.
"My hunch is that the mental health services at Tufts are going to shift into a more managed-care, medicalized, symptom-oriented kind of service," he said.
Over the years, he said, the Counseling Center has taken a "developmental perspective, giving students an opportunity to grow and develop personally, emotionally, and academically. If they needed support, students were able to get it effectively as long as they needed."
According to Luz-Alterman, this approach was a rarity among Boston-area institutions.
"When I look at mental health services at places like MIT and Harvard, I think Tufts has something really unique," he said. "My experience was that what goes on at MIT and Harvard is abysmal, with students needing to wait weeks to see someone for an initial appointment."
Luz-Alterman described Harvard and MIT's mental health services as "feeling like really user-unfriendly systems."
In his time as a practitioner, Luz-Alterman has seen students from Tufts, MIT, and Harvard, many of whom were referred to him by their universities' mental health services.
A senior staff member at the Counseling Center, whose name has been withheld for job-security reasons, also expressed concern over the changes - including the fact that a graduate student training program at the Counseling Center that is currently home to approximately a dozen graduate interns will be a certain casualty of the merger.
Though the new center will host post-doctoral students instead, the staff member worried that only a few post-doctoral students would be replacing the dozen interns currently at the Counseling Center.
"My understanding is that... there is more interest in providing a shorter-term treatment with increased referrals into the community," the staff member said. "In the past, we haven't had to do that as much, because we've had interns available."
Stanton said that while the number of post-doctoral students brought in has not yet been decided, "we have every intention to make up those hours, and we'll provide the same service."
The staff member was also concerned that cutting interns would further decrease the number of sites where psychology graduate students can complete their on-the-job training.
"There are a significant number of senior clinicians in the Boston area who trained as interns at Tufts, which opens the question of where people will train," the staff member said.
