Student health centers don’t perform major surgery. Similarly, Wood contends, no student counseling center should be expected to treat all mental health disorders. But it shouldn’t just refer them elsewhere either.
For the high-need students, TCU partners with off-campus facilities to provide on-campus services, like dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). “The fact that we offer these services on campus removes a lot of barriers,” Wood explains.
“Even though the treatment center is 10 minutes down the road and it’s the exact same program, to have it on campus and just for students, it opens doors to make students a lot more willing to do it. We saw 24 students for DBT, and 22 are still enrolled. In the past, they probably all would have dropped out.”
Those students and many others are also offered peer support communities, which are modeled on recovery groups. “No one expects a client with one month of sobriety to avoid relapse if all therapeutic interventions are stopped,” Wood notes. “We should have the same mentality with other concerns like depression and anxiety.”
The peer support communities really took off when Wood, true to his word about collaborating, agreed to a colleague’s suggestion to launch a group based on Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop fantasy role-playing game. “I didn’t know much about D&D, just the stereotypes,” he recalls. “But I was excited because traditionally, it’s been really hard to get students who are gamers to come into counseling. So, I thought, let’s see if students will be interested.”
They were. The first D&D-based peer support community filled up in one day. There are now four, each with eight students meeting regularly to play, with a staff member serving as Dungeon Master (a guide and referee for the players, who work together on adventures). One student told Wood that while he loved the games themselves, he truly valued knowing that if he texted at 2 in the morning that he needed someone to talk to, everyone in the group would respond.
TCU now offers a wide range of peer support communities, for grief, eating and body image issues, depression and anxiety, and recovery, to name just a few. Many were suggested by students, and they are largely student-led. “What we’ve found,” Woods explains, “is that many students elect to join a peer support community instead of counseling. Even more surprisingly, many students report that these support communities meet their needs. That was a huge finding.”