Mental health articles

A Developmental Approach to College Counseling
Th e foregoing perhaps suggests a realistic mission and therapeutic orientation
for college counselors. In an era when college counseling centers are challenged
both by the volume of students seeking services and by the severity
of many students’ pathology (Benton, Robertson, Tseng, Newton, & Benton,
2003), few centers can provide the depth and breadth of treatment necessary
for students to resolve deep-seated confl icts, reconcile to early trauma, or
modify rigid self-defeating character traits. Eff orts to assume these traditional
therapeutic assignments within the time constraints of college mental health
are likely to frustrate therapist and patient alike. What counselors can strive to do, however, is support and promote developmental plasticity at those
moments of transition or stress when students are tempted to retreat from the
uncertainties and strains of the passage into adulthood.
If the essence of successful development is internal reorganization, then
hallmarks of pathognomic development are surely rigidity, unyielding attachments
to the choices of earlier developmental stages, and lack of receptivity
to new relational patterns. When development preempts new possibilities,
adolescents who had previously achieved only tenuous adjustments are likely
to deteriorate, and even those who had previously accommodated well are
likely to struggle, in keeping pace with the new and changing sociocultural
expectations of their age. In specifi cally concentrating on helping students
weather change without resorting to fundamentally pathological “solutions”
to life’s challenges or prematurely foreclosing on further developmental possibilities,
as counselors “we have to rely more heavily on the inherent restorative
capacities that [our adolescent patients] bring to their psychological
distress,” activating abilities that are “oft en dormant under the weight of an . . .
insecure future and an unworked out relationship to the past” (Noam, 1999,
pp. 62–63).
Th is approach to college mental health emphasizes consistency in philosophy
and focus, rather than in technique, and, depending on the immediate
impediments to developmental progression, may suggest a range of quite dissimilar
interventions. For instance, techniques that promote self-regulation and
aff ect tolerance may be appropriate for students who are unable to manage the
anxiety of transition and change except by recourse to self-destructive acting
out. By contrast, treatment that challenges students’ beliefs about themselves
and their past may be appropriate for those who are in jeopardy of constricting
their choices in life, as illustrated by the following vignette.