Tuttleman Counseling Services, the university’s main source of mental health support, has changed several of its programs to address direct concerns from students, including being waitlisted, difficulty accessing services when needing help and short operating hours.
“I hear it from students, I hear it from administrators, I hear it from a lot of people that TCS has really changed, that it feels much more accessible,” said Andrew Lee, director of Tuttleman Counseling Services. “I don’t get the complaint of, ‘I can’t see my counselor,’ ‘I haven’t been able to see somebody for six weeks,’ ‘I haven’t been able to see someone when I really wanted that,’ I haven’t heard that since we made that transition.”
Tuttleman previously utilized a system that created weeks-long waitlists to see a counselor. When Lee started as director in 2021, he changed the system to allow students to see a counselor on a short-term basis before referring them to outside services.
To serve all 30,000 students that attend Temple, TCS prioritizes serving students that don’t have the ability to seek outside support. If some students can easily access counseling, therapy or psychiatry outside of the university or if they require a more intensive treatment program, TCS’ case management team will support the transition from in-house to external service.
Tuttleman has also been consistently fully staffed with their counselors, psychiatrists and clinicians even after adding positions and more resources, Lee said. They were able to hire eight more counselors and open a center on the Health Sciences campus after receiving $1 million in 2023 to improve retention efforts, The Temple News reported.
“[Provost Gregory Mandel] committed significant dollars to investing in specifically mental health resources, so we’ve been able to increase salaries and staff, which has helped us retain staff,” said Mark Denys, associate director of health and well-being. “We definitely had a big struggle with retention of staff, and now I think we have one person leaving at the end of this fiscal year, the first person in a year and a half, which is fantastic.”
Serious psychological distress affects 21% of college students, with 51.7% experiencing acute positive loneliness, according to a Fall 2022 American College Health Association study. Only about 37% of students sought mental health care while at college, according to a different March 2024 report from the U.S. News/Generation Lab.
“I think having some kind of mental health understanding when we’re looking at our students and what they’re probably not going to tell us, I think could be really important to us as instructors,” said Brandon Snead, a recreation therapy instructor. “Just to be aware of students who can’t give us a reason why they’re late, but us taking the perspective that maybe they’re really struggling.”
TCS’ programs extend from therapeutic yoga and meditation to a peer-to-peer anonymous online support system called TogetherAll.
TCS also offers “Let’s Talk” programs, or walk-in events at different campus locations with counselors that are informal, confidential consultations. This semester, Let’s Talk is at the Wellness Resource Center on Mondays, the International Student Affairs Office on Tuesdays, the IDEAL office on Wednesdays and the DRS office on Fridays.
The group therapy programs offer options for students to work with other students and counselors through their mental health struggles, like classes to cope with ADHD, queer and Black student support groups, a grief circle and relationship-based classes.
Tuttleman has around 40 clinical staff members from counselors to psychiatrists and urgent crisis counselors who work in rotations. Although some students who seek TCS’s support are referred elsewhere, the counseling process is not meant to be rigid — it exists to be able to support the needs of as many students as possible, Lee said.
“Pretty much any time that we’re open, students can come in and we have counselors available to speak with them, so that was something that was really important to me,” Lee said. “Students want to receive the help when they need the help, they don’t want to wait or have that gap in the support they need. That’s why we did everything we did.”
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