University Hall, located on The Oval, is the home of the graduate school at Ohio State. Credit: Brooke Tacsar | Lantern Reporter
Ohio State’s undergraduate students may dominate campus in numbers, but graduate and professional students are still a priority for the Counseling and Consultation Service.
Under Ohio House Bill 33, which established budget estimates for state agencies and programs for 2024 and 2025 after it passed in July 2023, Ohio State received $2.5 million as part of the $20 million dedicated to university mental health support for students, Micky Sharma, the director of CCS, said.
Alongside other university-wide endeavors, such as a program aimed at training student organizations in establishing mental health ambassador positions, CCS plans to implement a variety of their own, including teletherapy services, a graduate student administrative assistant position, biofeedback equipment and online mental health modules, Sharma said.
“Teletherapy sessions will have evening and weekend appointments and all graduates will have access to that,” Sharma said. “Welltrack Boost, a third-party vendor that we’re adding, has different modules for mental health support.”
Additionally, a graduate student assistant will help CCS with outreach, and biofeedback — a technology that uses electrical pads to discover involuntary body processes such as fast heart rates — will be implemented into clinical sessions to allow therapists to learn how physiological activity changes, such as relaxing the body, can improve mental health, Sharma said.
“Biofeedback is another way to address things like, for instance, stress management, and overall mindfulness that can be helpful as well,” Sharma said.
These new services are available for all students, but teletherapy and the digital mental health modules were built with the schedules of graduate and professional students in mind and the importance of flexibility and accessibility, Sharma said.
“We know that they are people who are doing their academic work and many of them are also teaching,” Sharma said. “There can be some extra pressures that they experience.”
Sharma said for graduate students who struggle financially, the Student Advocacy Center offers a Mental Health Emergency Fund of up to $1,500 to ensure mental health services are accessible to all students. The fund can be used for therapy sessions, medications, transportation and childcare costs associated with therapy attendance such as babysitter fees.
“I cannot impress upon you how important [this fund] is for students to access because our graduate students struggle fiscally,” Sharma said. “This is a way to get money back into your pocket.”
During the 2023 fall semester, graduate and professional students constituted roughly 22% of the student body, according to Ohio State’s enrollment report, and 29% of the students who utilized counseling and consultation clinical services were graduate and professional students.
Forty percent of the group counseling programs offered by CCS were designated specifically for graduate and professional students, Sharma said.
“We think about mental health care the same way we think about medical care,” Sharma said. “Mental health is the exact same way because there [are] some things you can treat [with] an outpatient, short-term model, and there [are] other things that need more significant care and you may need to see a specialist in the community.”
Dave Isaacs, Student Life’s communications and media relations manager, said the university has always supported graduate students.
“We recognize that graduate students may have a different perspective and different needs than undergraduates, and we work to try to meet those needs to support them in their unique journey,” Isaacs said.
CCS is among the many offices on campus that focus a great deal of attention on graduate students, Isaacs said.
Currently, CCS provides a one-hour graduate workshop on mental health, a variety of identity-sharing graduate therapy groups, including one for international students, and graduate student groups that discuss a variety of graduate-based topics such as academic success, Sharma said.
“A healthy part of that program is for our graduate students,” Sharma said.
A workshop on perfectionism is amongst the most popular services used by graduates, Sharma said.
“We had a graduate [who] went to this perfectionist workshop and said afterward to the workshop leader [that] it changed their life because they had been trying to be a perfectionist their entire life,” Sharma said.
These existing programs, however, will soon be accompanied by the new ones funded by Ohio House Bill 33 this year, Sharma said.
Sharma said if CCS does not have the program a student needs, they are able to recommend approved local services.
“We have a community provider database on our website all students can access and use,” Sharma said. “There [are] 229 providers in the community listed on that database.”
The goal of CCS is to help graduate students in their professional, academic and personal lives, Sharma said.
“We’re going to help them learn skills that will assist them not only as a graduate student at Ohio State but when they leave here and launch their career wherever they go,” Sharma said.
