Mental health articles

Depending upon how broadly college mental health practitioners defi ne their
responsibility, the following goals may guide their interventions:
Enhance students’ academic accomplishments to implement the college’s
educational aims.
Facilitate development of students’ full achievement potential by
helping them overcome cognitive limitations and resolve psychological
confl icts, inhibitions, or aff ective disturbances.
Promote students’ capacity for autonomous thinking, independent judgment,
understanding the world, problem solving, and decision making.
Promote students’ self-awareness and individuation, and hence their
more consciously focused and directed life plans and goals.
Enhance quality of life in other areas, insofar as happiness or unhappiness
aff ects intellectual accomplishment.
Help students productively utilize the “psychosocial moratorium” of
college, the transition from adolescence to adulthood (Erikson, 1968).
Develop students’ skills for future careers and values for informed
citizenship.
Making these goals explicit can help practitioners be aware of their
assumptions about achievement, guide them in selecting appropriate interventions,
and allow them to assess their success. But since these goals are
complex, abstract, and not simply measured, it is not easy to arrive at straightforward
criteria for success. Sophisticated counselors or psychotherapists tend to hold themselves to more complex standards than improved grades or,
for that matter, symptom relief or better study habits. Because of adventitious
and uncontrollable factors, such as socioeconomic disadvantage and underpreparation
for college work, grades may not faithfully refl ect knowledge,
learning, or growth. Moreover, college success is only mildly or coincidentally
correlated with postcollege success (whether measured by income, quality of
life, or positive impact on society). According to the former dean of Harvard
College:
Th ings that Harvard used to talk about—courage, ambition, mental
toughness, integrity, imagination, compassion, capacity to rebound
from reversals, a desire to leave the world a better place than you found
it—these are the things that matter in real life. Not insignifi cant variations
in grade point average. (Lewis, 2003)
Hence, in assessing educational counseling or personal psychotherapy,
counselors must remind themselves regularly of the larger issues of human
development at stake.
Fortunately, education and psychotherapy share some fundamental goals:
to expand students’ awareness; increase their tolerance of frustration, ambiguity,
and competing points of view; deepen their care for themselves, others,
and the world at large; and improve their capacities for critical thinking, skill
development, problem solving, decision making, and confl ict resolution. In
short, psychotherapy is ideally suited to complement and support the educational
mission of universities.