As a child, Xiomara Garcia, 21, assumed that attending a four-year college was out of reach.
Her parents had never finished middle school, and money was tight. But there she was — a bioengineering major at Santa Clara University with a generous scholarship.
In some of her classes, she was the only person of color. “It was like the biggest culture shock of my life,” Ms. Garcia said.
She began to worry that she was an impostor who didn’t belong. Then a family member died. All of this, plus a stressful course load and unresolved childhood trauma, made it difficult to control her emotions.
She tried online therapy, but finding a place to log in to her sessions privately, away from her roommate, proved difficult. Once, she talked to her therapist over video from underneath a stairwell on campus, steps away from a cafe. Eventually, she decided to see someone in person.
Her new therapist had an office in the dorm where she had lived during her freshman year. The space included shells and rocks that her therapist had found, as well as soft lighting, cozy chairs and a basket of snacks — a welcome change from hiding in a busy building or braving the clinical environment of the main counseling center, she said.
A growing number of campus mental health professionals, often referred to as “embedded counselors,” are now working out of dorms and other academic buildings. Schools say the setup reduces the stigma around getting help while also making the counselors more visible and accessible at a time when 37 percent of college students say they are grappling with depression. In a recent survey of school counseling center directors, nearly one-third said they used embedded counselors, up from 20 percent five years prior. The shift shows how colleges are rethinking the way they deliver mental health care, by adopting a model designed to meet students where they are, ideally before they face a crisis.
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