Dealing with Distressed Students

Roberts Wesleyan College - Rochester, NY

Guidelines for Dealing with Distressed Students

Each person has his or her own style of approaching and responding to others. Furthermore people have differing capacities to deal with others' problems. It is important to know your personal limits as a helper. If you choose to try to help a distressed student, or if a student approaches you to talk about personal problems:

Talk to the student in private when both of you have time and are not rushed or preoccupied. Give the student your undivided attention.
If you have initiated the contact, express your concern in behavioral, nonjudgmental terms.
Listen to thoughts and feelings in a sensitive non-threatening way. Communicate understanding by repeating back the gist of what the student has told you. Try to include both the content and feelings.
Work with the student to clarify the costs and benefits of each option for handling the problem from the student’s point of view.
Avoid judging, evaluating, criticizing, unless the student asks your opinion. Such behavior is apt to close the student off from you and from getting the help needed.
Help the student see there are options – that there are professionals on campus that can assist him/her.
Suggest in a caring, supportive manner that the student may benefit from meeting with a counselor from the Counseling Center. You may want to explain the following:
- Counseling at the Counseling Center is confidential. This means that information about the student cannot be released to other RWC offices, family, professors, etc. without the student's written permission (the exception being if the student is in danger of harming him/herself or others).
- The services are free to undergraduates taking nine or more credits and some graduate students (see above).
- The first meeting is typically a 15-20 minute triage appointment where the counselor gathers basic information and provides students with a good clinical match for services based on their presenting issues.
- Give the student the Counseling Center phone number (x6882). The student can call from your office or from home. No appointments can be made for a student by a third party without the student directly speaking to the secretary and asking for an appointment.
- If you feel that the student is in crisis, you can call the Counseling Center or have the student call from your office. Tell the secretary that this is an "emergency" and she will connect you with a counselor immediately. If needed, the student can be seen for a crisis appointment that day.

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