Two full-time employees — and a handful of interns — run Webster University’s Counseling and Life Development department.
The staff balances approximately 75 clients on a weekly basis, not including group services offered or the mental health emergency calls the office receives.
In addition to having a small staff with high demand, the department ran completely on paper and pencil, and had no online counseling services available for Webster students. That was until a few months ago.
Now, the department is getting an upgrade – it just has to prove it deserves it.
According to the department assistant director Samantha Sasek, two years ago, Webster received federal earmarked funding, money given to the university by the government for specific needs. Approximately $150,000 of that funding was required to go to the department and be spent on technology-related needs to increase students’ access to mental health care.
With the funding comes the introduction of three new programs this school year to bring Webster’s counseling up to the 21st century: Togetherall, ProtoCall and Titanium Schedule.
“The reason we haven’t been able to offer these types of services to students before is because we didn’t have the money or the budget,” Sasek said. “These contracts are very expensive. Electronic health record systems are not cheap. Multi-year contracts are in the tens of thousands of dollars. This is big money that the university did not have.”
Togetherall, a web-based peer-to-peer support platform, brings free online and anonymous counseling to any Webster student. As of Sept. 6, 121 Webster students are registered for the program. Students who sign up are presented with a feed in which they can post anything and can interact with students from all over the world.
The program is monitored 24/7 by licensed mental health professionals. If a student is posting something that warrants intervention, professionals are notified to check on the student.
Togetherall also offers free assessments and self-guided videos on a number of concerns like depression and stress management.
“If a student has a specific issue or concern and they want to learn more, they might be able to address that need through one of these self-guided videos. And that sometimes might be enough, right? If the student doesn’t necessarily need ongoing mental health counseling services, they might be able to have an answer questioned or meet a particular need through one of these self-guided videos that they could take instead,” Sasek said.
Seventy percent of Webster’s Togetherall users report having no existing formal mental health support. Thirty-five percent of them are men; 38% are over the age of 25; 55% identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color); and 7% are trans or non-binary.
“With a platform like Togetherall, students who might not typically access mental health care are still being connected and supported and in a way that feels maybe a little bit safer or less threatening,” Sasek said.
Hand-in-hand with Togetherall, ProtoCall serves as an extension of the Counseling department and functions as an emergency mental health counseling telephone line.
In the past, department director Patrick Stack and Sasek have been on call for mental health emergencies.
“We don’t get a ton of calls after hours, but we got just enough to where it was, you know, disruptive to our personal lives,” Sasek said. “So, just for sustainability and to help prevent burnout – since we have this money and these services are expensive – I started looking at what companies are out there or available to assist with specifically the on-call emergency mental health emergencies.”
With ProtoCall, when students call the Counseling office, they will be given the option to “press 1” to be connected with a mental health professional immediately instead of waiting for either Stack or Sasek to be available, a service that has been the most underutilized out of the three new programs so far.
With the introduction of Titanium Schedule, Counseling has upgraded its system to an electronic health record system instead of running off of paper and pencil, which was due to the lack of funding.
“We were always HIPAA compliant, but there’s always the risk when you have paper floating around and you use filing cabinets that something could happen, right? So the electronic health record system helps streamline processes like scheduling, the maintenance of client files, but it also ensures that we are HIPAA compliant,” Sasek said.
Sasek expresses concern that when this funding is spent, the university will not continue to fund the new initiatives.
“I want to justify and make a case that these services are absolutely needed and benefit students because my concern is when the money dries up, how as a department, how as a university are we going to continue to fund these services? We have a three-year contract. What happens after three years is outside of my control,” Sasek said.
Togetherall is saving the university money as the price for one contract year with the program is significantly less than the cost of hiring another full-time licensed clinician.
“I’ve been told that there’s no money to hire another full-time therapist, and not that this takes the place of a therapist, per se, but we are able to tap into and cast a wide net and reach our students for a more affordable price than if we were to hire someone on full-time to do the job,” Sasek said.
Sasek hopes students do not take the resources for granted as they may not stick along forever.
“I hope students will consume the heck out of these services because mental health services out there in the real world are expensive,” Sasek said. “And that’s a huge barrier to accessing services once you graduate.”
Graphics by KP Benton
Featured image by James Pepper
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