Browsing by Subject "College student mental health treatment"

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Counselors in Academic Residence : a program evaluation report for the CARE Program
(2017-05) Balsan, Michael Jordan; Pustejovsky, James E.; Borich, Gary D.
Undergraduate students in the United States experience alarmingly high rates of mental health disorders (Blanco et al., 2008). In response to this concerning trend, Colleges and universities are working to establish effective mental health programs (Eisenberg, Hunt, & Speer, 2012). As entering mental health counseling at or near the onset of a disorder is associated with better outcomes and lower life-time disease burden, such programs would benefit from taking an early intervention approach (Gore et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2005). The current study examined whether the Counselors in Academic Residence Program (CARE) can serve as an early intervention for college students’ mental health. The CARE Program has also been considered a possible solution for early intervention with students from populations that tend to under-utilize traditional counseling services (e.g. male, Asian American/ Asian, Hispanic/Latino/a students) (Wong et al., 2014a). The present study includes a secondary data analysis of 2,147 intake records from students in two different mental health programs on a large public university’s campus. Two years of student records from both the CARE Program and a traditional counseling center were analyzed. These records included presenting clinical symptoms and socio-demographics factors. Results suggest the CARE Program captures students with less severe symptoms, which suggests an early intervention effect on student distress. Additionally, the CARE Program served proportionally more students from some of the targeted socio-demographic groups that traditionally underutilize counseling services. This report also offers a logic model of program transactions, inputs, constraints, and outputs for evaluators to consider.