Ethan Hague, Campus Carrier staff writer
Lily Verren, Campus Carrier staff writer
The Berry College Counseling Center recently hired several new staff members who hope to further expand the capacity of the center and connect with more students in the future. These hopes come at a time when the Berry community has decisively asked for more availability from the center.
Becca Smith, director of counseling at Berry, said that last year the wait for an appointment would be several weeks long.
“Last year we found out that we didn’t have enough people because people were calling to set up appointments and, would wait three to four weeks to get in,” Smith said. “We sent out a survey in late October and overwhelmingly it was ‘we want in-person services, we want more counselors.’”
Smith said that the demand for counseling appointments meant that the counselors at the center were incredibly busy.
“Me, Terri [Cordle] and Carley [Price] were offering about 65 hours of counseling last year a week between the three of us,” Smith said. “We just added 25 free [hours].”
The Counseling Center can now meet with about 100 students a week.
Smith has been devoting her time to supervising new counselors and collaborating with other campus associations.
“I like doing the presentations and meeting with student groups, organizations [and] athletic groups,” Smith said. “I think Berry is going in a better direction with Haley Smith and the new Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Haley and I have been collaborating, which breaks down that barrier. I see that the Counseling Center needs to go out and meet these students where they’re at.”
One of Smith’s primary focuses this year has been diversifying the part-time counseling staff.
“Diversifying our staff doesn’t just mean race. That means, interns and counselors-in-training [who] bring a different perspective,” Smith said. “We have Peer Wellness Coaches, who are senior psychology students, a whole different service for students who may not want to see a counselor or someone older but would be willing to see someone their own age, [who] knows what they’re going through right now and can relate in a different way.”
For students that need help but aren’t as inclined to seek it out, Smith has worked with Majonica Askew, Berry College’s new suicide prevention project director, to introduce a new Suicide Awareness and Prevention program in the Center, which includes Question, Persuade, and Refer (QPR) training.
Hannan Razeq, senior peer wellness coach at the Center, said that the peer wellness coaches, a new program at the center, are having a slow start to the semester.
“For us, we’re slowly getting appointments because we’re so new,” Razeq said. “But I project that we will get more people as the school year progresses, it’s just the first week.”
Razeq is one of the new additions to the peer wellness program. She is a senior student at Berry who came to play softball and continued her passion for psychology that started in high school.
“I’m really fascinated with people; I always have been,” Razeq said. “What makes them tick, why they do certain things, their behaviors and what influences their behaviors. So, for me it was kind of a no-brainer that I wanted to do psychology.”
Kuo Deng, assistant professor of psychology at Berry, offers her time as a psychologist to the Counseling Center to get postdoctoral hours and to contribute the same positivity that was given to her by counselors in college.
“I went to the College of Wooster in Ohio, and there, I had a great experience working with a group of students,” she said. “We did some outreach work for mental health, but also I had my own therapist at the time, I attended some group therapy. I think it was not only eye-opening for me to know how much there is for us to do, but also it was just a great healing process.”
Deng’s aim for possible changes in the future focuses on healing.
“Coming to Berry, I was really amazed by how there’s still a place that emphasizes nature so much, we appreciate the land we’re on, and I think nature itself is very healing for mental health,” she said.
She’s considering setting up mindfulness and meditation workshops to support Berry’s thriving culture of work-life balance and to help students that may not otherwise talk to a counselor one-on-one.
“The world is getting more and more chaotic and everybody’s under a lot of different types of stresses that it’s especially hard with mental health because they can be invisible,” Deng said.
Smith believes it’s especially important to give underlying support to minority communities.
“People of marginalized communities often go through more trauma, which doesn’t mean they have more mental health concerns, but it means they may have more stress and may need more support,” Smith said.To make an appointment with the counseling center, students can call 706.236.2259 or visit the office in the Ladd Center.