Counseling and Psychological Services is getting a makeover.
Since the Office of the Provost began a campaign three years ago to invest more funding and resources in CAPS, wait times for students and individual caseloads for staff members have decreased, and on-campus awareness campaigns have increased, CAPS director Ilene Rosenstein said.
Affirming the commitment to increased student health, eight full-time staffers were added to CAPS in July.
This change, as well as additional funding, reflects the suggestions of an outside consultant hired by Provost Ron Daniels to evaluate CAPS's performance.
The consultant's report emphasized proper staffing - including hiring experts in specific areas like Asian American health issues - striking a balance between prevention and treatment and increasing time for strategy and planning.
"The growing clientele of CAPS was stretching them to the breaking point and beyond," Associate Provost for Education Andrew Binns said. "It was extraordinarily difficult to provide appropriate services to students."
These issues are common to campuses across the country, Rosenstein said in a presentation to the Student Life Committee of the Board of Trustees earlier this month.
Penn isn't the only school seeing increased utilization of on-campus counseling and increased focus on mental-health issues; rates of students receiving counseling have doubled at schools across the country.
"Not only are more students showing up, more students are showing up in greater distress than 10 or 15 years ago," Binns said.
The increase of students showing symptoms of depression is partly a reflection of an increase of depression in the general population because "our world is a more stressful place," said Marna Barrett, professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the School of Medicine.
But the nationwide increase can also be attributed to the normalization of counseling.
"Students are feeling freer today" to come forward with mental-health issues "where before it was stigmatized," Rosenstein said.
She joked, "Penn students really want to succeed in everything - including their counseling."
