Starting from the 2021 fall semester, the Student Counseling Center (SCC) in Fu Jen Catholic University announces key changes and additions to the guidelines for each counseling session.
Every student is now required to fill out an application form and schedule a pre-interview before being scheduled for in-person counseling sessions. From September 22nd to October 4th, the pre-interviews were conducted online via Microsoft Teams due to the impact of COVID-19. Since then, the pre-interviews have been conducted in-person. The Student Counseling Center would then match each student with a counseling psychologist for counseling sessions. The SCC claims on its Facebook Page that this change is to “increase efficiency on scheduling for counseling sessions,” adding that “let us all cope with these adjustments.”
Contact information of the Student Consulting Center. Photo provided by Student Consulting Center.
Aside from the pre-registration process, another major change is that there must be at least a three-week interval between six sessions and the next. Regarding this decision, Hsing-Tsu, Tsai, the Clinical Psychologist responsible for the English department, responds that “a shortage of resources” has led to this new rule. Tsai says that the SCC sees a steady increase of demand from students. The SCC estimates that around 700 students have applied for one and/or more counseling sessions last semester. This spur, compared with around 500 students applying for counseling sessions three years ago, has taken a toll on the already strained resources at the SCC. (To protect the privacy and anonymity of each student, the SCC does not wish to provide exact figures.)
There are currently around twenty clinical psychologists on site, Tsai says, to accommodate students’ needs. The SCC used to adopt the “first come first served” model, with students calling in and making appointments for themselves on the first day of school in each semester. Tsai confesses that not all students can receive proper care on this basis. The SCC is switching to a “round-robin” method, with “time slices are assigned to each process in equal portions and in circular order, handling all processes without priority,” hence the pre-interview and the three-week interval. This method, as Tsai elaborates, is a compromise hoping to cope with the increasing demand from students. Tsai cannot properly estimate its result yet since the SCC has only been implementing the guideline starting this semester.
The whole point of adopting the “round-robin” method, Tsai claims, is to open up opportunities for students who need help. “Picture a one-lane road, with a massive truck stuck in the middle of it. There might be a lot of smaller cars behind but cannot get through because the truck is taking up all the spaces,” Tsai proposes the analogy for further comprehension of this change. On the other hand, Tsai shows his concern regarding the three-week interval, with its effect on both the student and their counselor. “It’s an ongoing process,” Tsai says. “And we are still observing the effect until the end of the semester.”
The necessity to free up more resources for students that need counseling is imminent. Three students from National Taiwan University committed suicide over the span of five days in November last year. “We are seeing acts of imitation,” Chén lì zhōng, head of the Department of Mental and Oral Health under the Ministry of Health and Welfare, responded. “We need to fix the safety net, figure out the causation and stop the tragedy from ever happening again.” In total, 59 college students had committed suicide in 2020, according to Pan Wen-chung, the Minister of Education in Taiwan. The Ministry of Education also saw a 68% increase on the number of students who had suicide intentions, from around 800 students in 2018 to 1350 students in 2019. According to Ya-Ling Huang, Chairman of Taiwan Counseling Psychologist Union, around 50,000 people are being counseled. The outbreak of COVID-19 in May worsens the already fragile status quo, with counseling sessions being stopped abruptly, Huang shows concern on its effect on individuals, among 30,000 of whom are students.
Wei-Xuan Lin of The Reporter investigated this phenomenon. She found out that while online counseling sessions are a probable alternative, the tight regulations in Taiwan make it almost impossible for organizations to conduct online counseling. For one, counselors in Taiwan are required to conduct sessions in the office. This makes online counseling impossible when counselors were working from home or were telecommuting back in May.
Tsai acknowledges the ambiguity and difficulty when the SCC was struggling to figure out alternatives to tend to students’ needs. The SCC eventually settled on conducting online counseling sessions via Microsoft Teams should remote-teaching continue throughout this semester. On October 4th, FJCU allowed students to have class back on campus. With the COVID regulations loosened, the SCC resumes in-person counseling sessions. However, as Tsai points out, the lack of counselors to provide proper care for every student in need remains a big hurdle. Tsai hopes that the new changes can benefit more students, but without a clear result, many challenges still lay ahead.