This semester alone, Temple University suffered from the unfortunate passing of five students. When the university became aware of each student’s incident, they sent out an email and refer grieving students to Tuttleman Counseling Services (TCS) in attempts to have them talk through their problems by means of professional help.
When I lost my father in 2013, I saw a counselor for the next two years afterwards, which helped immensely with the grieving process. However, the difference between my experience with professional help and the experiences of thousands of Temple students trying to grapple with the losses of five of their own lies in the quality and amount of professional help available to students here.
Tuttleman Counseling Services are a great resource for students struggling with mental health but the counselors there are overworked and scarce in quantity. The services offered are insufficient for a student body of 39,000, especially considering the amount of students that struggle with mental health on a daily basis.
I wasn’t at Temple when I saw my therapist but many students don’t have the luxury of outside help available to them. Counseling outside of Temple is usually overpriced and far off-campus, while the counseling services that Temple offers is not enough for its growing student body.
I strongly believe that professional and medical help are the way to go for students coping with serious issues, and I don’t think that issues like these can be solved through simply having a conversation with friends and family about them.
I have a few alternatives in mind to professional and medical help for mental illness but more in favor of a reallocation of funding for Tuttleman. More money needs to be put toward our students’ mental health by hiring more counselors, expanding Tuttleman’s location, and creating an overall larger presence of Tuttleman’s services on our campus. I understand that Tuttleman is moving its location next semester, which is a step in the right direction.
In addition to revamping Tuttleman structurally, I also think that the services it offers can be altered. Two of the five students that passed away this semester from drug overdoses, so I think that Tuttleman should provide specific groups that address substance abuse problems among students, nipping them in the bud before it’s too late.
Counseling attributed directly to substance abuse would definitely be helpful, since being college students, becoming sucked up in the lure of drugs and alcohol can be tempting at times. Mental health and substance abuse go hand in hand and one could very well influence the other, so it’s important to address both realms in Tuttleman.
However, if these groups are not implemented inside of Tuttleman itself, who’s to say that student’s can’t form their own awareness groups? Student-run organizations can be formed not only in response to the TCS controversy, but also to issues plaguing our student population, including mental health and substance abuse. The implementation of these organizations would serve as middle-ground alternatives to professional help and merely talking to friends and family about these issues. These groups could bring students together that would normally not cross paths.
Individuals would not begin as necessarily friends with everyone in the room, but rather establish bonds with one another that are crucial and growing. It may not be a room of professionals but it’d serve as places for students to be open and honest about issues affecting them.
In a way, this unstructured, non-professional atmosphere could make students more inclined to participate since the nervousness that some get about opening up to an individual trained in the psychological field would be eliminated.
There are preventative measures that can be taken to create a gentler atmosphere here that accommodates more to students’ needs. The hustle-and-bustle of Philadelphia combined with a strong educational institution and countless other hurdles that students overcome every day can become too much for some.
It is still difficult for me to imagine what the families and friends of the five students that have passed on are going through. However, what I do know is that Temple has the resources available to it in order to make improvements to Tuttleman Counseling Services as well as provide other assistive programs for students in need. In order for students to receive a stellar education here, their other needs have to be addressed to ensure their success.
–Sydney McFadden