By Sophie Lange, Assistant News Editor
Gettysburg College’s Counseling and Wellness Services has long been promoted as a confidential resource for students’ mental health on campus. They provide services such as mental health consultations, workshops, referrals to campus partners, peer support, group and individual treatment and referrals to community partners. The importance of readily available care, diversity in care options, students’ desire to remain autonomous and increased use of resources across campus and in the community are all things the center highlights.
According to the Executive Director of Counseling and Wellness Krista Dhruv, many of the challenges they face surround their need for more participation in their groups and workshops.
Dhruv described the lack of participation as unfortunate: “We [the Counseling and Wellness Center] can reach more students and build peer support systems through these valuable programs.”
One of the most significant limitations faced by Counseling and Wellness Services is their ability to provide higher-level care for students who need it.
“We have limitations on the number of students we can serve for higher level care such as psychiatry and weekly treatment as well as specialized services such as eating disorders and chemical dependency,” Dhruv explained. “These types of limitations are typical for a center of our size which isn’t designed to serve all needs comprehensively. For these services, we refer students to community providers to ensure they get the appropriate care.”
Despite this, Dhruv said the student feedback on their programs has been very positive. Counseling and Wellness Services receives requests for specific workshops that focus on certain groups or topics that the students found to be particularly meaningful. However, Dhruv noted that they did not collect feedback for the clinical services, such as therapy, that they provide. However, the center plans to implement a survey for students who utilized their services to give feedback.
In their description of “Our Approach to Care” on the Counseling and Wellness Services website, they state, “We provide timely access to wellness education and mental health care… [and] help connect students to a wide range of services, including self-help resources, natural support systems, peer support, affinity groups, religious spaces and therapy both on and off campus.”
The Gettysburgian reached out to several students about their experiences with Counseling and Wellness Services. One of the major criticisms from the students about the center was the lack of timely scheduling and the inability to provide adequate mental healthcare.
Katie Poliero ’25 said, “I have experienced firsthand how the center’s lack of proper staffing has delayed scheduling, turned away walk-ins, and shortened appointments to the point that my peers and I are struggling to get the necessary support that we were promised.”
Additionally, the Counseling and Wellness Center has garnered a reputation for turning away students who require higher-level care rather than referring students to other providers in the greater Gettysburg community.
Situations have occurred in which Counseling and Wellness Services has told students that their mental health was at a manageable level, expressing that the center no longer needed to see them. Later, when the students expressed that they felt they still required mental healthcare services, Counseling and Wellness Services told them they required a level of care that was higher than the services they could provide. This was the case for Ryan Melinn ’26.
“I also hoped to see a therapist on campus, because I desperately needed a real therapist, and I was hoping college would be a new beginning for me, where I could actually focus on my mental health and learn how to cope,” Melinn said. “I had a few meetings with her [Dhruv]. Two or three. And for the first time, I was being honest with my therapist, because I genuinely needed and wanted help.”
After telling Dhruv about his challenges with his mental health and adjusting to college, Dhruv told Melinn that she felt he could handle these struggles on his own and that she no longer needed to see him.
Referring to this experience, Melinn said, “They pick and choose who they think they can handle, and tell everyone else not to do appointments because they can’t fit everyone into their schedule.”
When Melinn reached out to Senior Administrative Assistant Dani Mancini about this experience, he said that Dhruv sent him an email stating that he was never denied care but instead, was dealing with symptoms that were more severe than those the center had the ability to treat. Melinn also requested a new therapist in the hope of feeling more comfortable following this experience, but they denied him this opportunity.
Melinn said that he felt Counseling and Wellness Services had gone from labeling him as “not mentally ill enough to too mentally ill once I tried to get proof of what was happening.”
In addition to his negative experience with the individual therapy services provided by the Counseling and Wellness Center, Melinn had also contacted them to request trigger warnings be added to the Monologues that First-Year students are required to attend during Orientation Week. The Monologues, which are a series of short skits put on by the Office of Residential and First-Year Programs, deal with topics such as sexual assault, which may be upsetting to some students.
Poliero spoke on the overall shortcomings they found with Counseling and Wellness Services.
“In my opinion, the shortcomings of the counseling center boil down to the vast gap between the extent to which the services are advertised to students and the actual capacity of the center,” said Poliero.
Poliero was able to take on a leadership role during First-Year Orientation this year, and they were reminded of just how often the college recommends new students to make use of the many services provided by the Counseling and Wellness Center.
“On the surface, this is a beautiful thing — therapy is important, and the steps our society has taken to destigmatize going to therapy are great. However, when students are encouraged to utilize a resource to that extent, it is important for that resource to have the capacity to handle all the students. The truth is that the Counseling [and Wellness] Center at Gettysburg does not have the capacity to support students’ needs,” Poliero said. “The school’s inability to back up their promise of access to support for all students is disappointing and needs to be corrected.”
This article originally appeared on pages 8 to 9 of the No. 2 October 2023 edition of The Gettysburgian’s magazine.
