Mary Czyzewski
During the Empathizing stage of the Mental Health projects, one thing our organization heard multiple times was that students who wanted to try therapy or who had tried it in the past just weren’t sure how to go about it or really what to do during their sessions. This information led to the idea of a kind of “therapy toolkit” that would tell students what to expect from counseling, and a meeting with the Counseling Center led to the idea of putting it into the Door-Knock bags the Counseling Center.
At this point the Door-Knock team got one of the current Door-Knock bags to investigate what, if any, information they contained to help people starting therapy. For the most part, the information on starting the process was about how one’s insurance would affect the cost or not; of course, that’s important information, but not the main concern of the students we heard from. The idea was to add a flier telling students about things like confidentiality, or their ability to switch therapists if one wasn’t a good match. The team also wanted to make sure it was simple to read and understand so that it didn’t put anyone off.
In mid-February a draft was sent off to the Counseling Center, and while the hope was for a discussion with them about what they liked and what might need to be changed, and then a collaborative effort to make a final flier, that is not what ended up happening, which while not the original hope, seems to have worked out fine. The Counseling Center instead took the ideas and concepts we presented them with and created a flier themselves, and sent us a copy in mid-August.
This flier can be found in the Fall 2019 Door-Knock bags handed out to every dorm room on campus, helping guide students who might be unsure or apprehensive about therapy through the experience.