About Our Services

Scope of Services: Individual Counseling

We provide collaborative and goal-focused counseling to enrolled students at no charge. We invite students with any concern to obtain a consultation during Initial Consultation Walk-In Hours.The walk-in counselor will help the student clarify the primary goal for their counseling collaboration and identify one or more options for attaining that goal.

We are able to provide counseling for the goals that most students present. Common counseling goals cluster under the following categories of concerns:

• Mental Health Concerns
  • Common goals: reduce mild-to-moderate depression or anxiety, decrease panic attacks
• Developmental Concerns
  • Common goals: adjust to college, prepare for life after Trinity, clarify identity (e.g., sexual orientation or gender identity)
• Personal Concerns
  • Common goals: cope with stress or loss or trauma (including sexual assault), reduce anger or guilt, improve self-esteem
• Interpersonal Concerns
  • Common goals: Reduce or cope with conflict in a specific relationship, make more meaningful connections with others, clarify sexual values or boundaries
• Cultural Concerns
  • Common goals: cope with or respond to experiences of oppression, clarify cultural identity/ies
• Academic Concerns
  • Common goals: Reduce academic stress or perfectionism
• Substance Use Concerns
  • Common goal: reduce substance use to reduce or eliminate negative consequences

Student Needs and Circumstances that Require an Off-Campus Referral

About ten percent of students request assessment, support, or treatment that requires an expertise or intensity that exceeds our capacity. For such a student, we provide a referral service, connecting the student to a local provider who can meet the need and (whenever possible) is a provider in the student’s insurance network.

This referral service includes facilitating the referral process to the extent that the student wishes. It can also include—only with the student’s authorization—consulting with a parent during the referral process.

Although a complete list of referral scenarios is impossible to enumerate, we most commonly refer students who seek or need:

• Weekly or ongoing appointments for supportive or exploratory counseling
• Treatment of a mental health condition with severe symptoms
• Treatment of an eating disorder
• Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Treatment with a method (e.g., Dialectical Behavior Therapy) that none of our counselors can provide
• Assessment of ADHD (we can screen for ADHD, but not diagnose)
• Documentation to support receiving accommodations, including an emotional support animal

Sometimes it becomes apparent after several sessions that a client needs more intensive treatment or a treatment method we cannot provide. If so, the counselor will explain the need and offer to facilitate a referral. A client’s repeated, urgent requests to see their counselor is one example of an indicator that specialized or more frequent treatment off campus is required.

Scope of Services: Counseling for Couples, Roommates, & Friends

When two or more enrolled Trinity students experience unresolved conflict or wish to deepen their relationship, a counselor can collaborate with them to pursue their mutual goal.

Scope of Services: Psychiatry

Our psychiatrist will provide an evaluation and subsequent psychiatric medication management at no charge for an enrolled student for whom we are providing counseling within our scope of services. The student’s counselor arranges the psychiatric evaluation; a student cannot schedule the evaluation directly.

Due to the psychiatrist’s limited availability, referrals to the psychiatrist are limited to counseling clients who have never been treated with psychiatric medication. The psychiatrist does not evaluate for or treat ADHD. Contact us if you would like to receive our Psychiatry Referral Guide or ADHD Referral Guide by email.

Scope of Services: Suicide- and Violence-Prevention

We urge any enrolled student who is at imminent risk for ending their life or the life of another person to seek prompt prevention services from us. Upon learning that a student is reporting they think they might end their life or the life of another person, one of our counselors will want to speak with that student as soon as possible. Ways to speak promptly with a counselor are described on the If You are a Student in Crisis webpage.