Trinity’s Student Counselling Service has this year seen more patients than any other year, four months out from the end of the academic term.
Since the start of the academic year, the service has seen 2,365 students – last year’s annual total was 2,236.
The average wait-time for counselling appointments in the service was 36.2 working days as of the beginning of this month – 10.8 days for a Support & Needs Assessment Planning (SNAP) session – where the service evaluates the needs of the student and decides whether to recommend counselling – followed by an mean wait time of 25.4 days for a counselling session.
Student Counsellor Chuck Rashleigh, who is a member of the service’s Senior Management Team, provided the figures in an email to The University Times and said that with another four months to go, the number of students seen this year “breaks all records for clients served in any full academic year in the SCS’s history”.
Rashleigh also wrote that there is a wide range in the wait-times. “Some students may wait less than 1 week [for a SNAP session], while others might wait 3-4 weeks.”
The service’s goal is to provide initial contact within 10 days.
“SNAPs enable counsellors to ‘triage’ a student’s needs, so that students at-risk are not left waiting”, Rashleigh said, adding that “for students whose mental health gets worse while they wait, we have urgent access appointments available every weekday that Trinity is open”.
The service aims to provide counselling to students deemed most at-risk “within 1-3 weeks of SNAP, and are informed about the availability of weekday emergency access”.
“Some students will have waited longer than 25 working days at this point in the year, and this is an issue we are working hard to address.”
Rashleigh added that in the week of February 21st, for example, the service provided “over 70 emergency consults to support students in distress”.
That week, a Trinity medicine student, Mark Melnychuck, died tragically on campus.
Last year, The University Times reported that Trinity’s Student Counselling Service had cleared its waiting list after being given a recruitment waiver from College.
Trish Murphy, the acting director of Trinity’s Student Counselling Services confirmed to this newspaper that College gave the service a waiver on recruitment, “so we were able to fill our roles without going through the recruitment subcommittee, so they’ve been really good. We took on extra people then”.
“Then everybody switched their holidays”, she said. “So we worked very hard to get through the waitlist. It had been gradually going down, we were really thrilled to kind of get the end of it before we started [the new academic year].”
Last August, the Irish Times reported that the counselling service had an average wait time of 40 days for follow-up appointments after their initial needs assessment.
