Fairfield University graduate students embrace teletherapy
FAIRFIELD — As the coronavirus pandemic exacerbates mental health problems on campus, graduate students at Fairfield University have turned to virtual counseling services to get the help they need.
This fall, Fairfield University began offering remote counseling through Uwill, a teletherapy platform that connects college and university students with mental health professionals across the country. The program allows the school’s graduate students to take advantage of the service on and off campus at no cost to themselves.
Mental health support is among graduate students’ top- cited needs today, according to Jill Buban, the vice president of digital strategy and online education at Fairfield University.
“Anxiety and stress are at an all- time high for students,” she said. “Teletherapy can reach them any time, any place, anywhere.”
Through the platform, Fairfield students can video chat, call or message licensed therapists who have an average of 12 years of experience.
“We’ve had high usage, higher than we thought,” Buban said. “As a new service for students, we were expecting somewhere around a 5 percent usage. In the first six months of our engagement, we're approaching 10 percent of our students taking advantage of teletherapy services offered through Uwill.”
Uwill touts that it takes about 15 minutes to register and book a first session, helping students bypass common obstacles to finding therapists including wait lists, lengthy referral processes and the intricacies of insurance. Almost half of sessions take place in the evening or on weekends, when most traditional counselors are unavailable.
The flexibility is particularly helpful for overwhelmed graduate students who might be balancing school with jobs and families, Buban said.
Counseling “is something that’s so important for our students,” said Buban, “given the data nationally and what we’ve heard directly from our students.”
Symptoms of depression among American graduate students have doubled during the COVID- 19 pandemic, and those of anxiety rose by 50 percent over the year, according to a survey conducted by the Student Experience in the Research University Consortium, a partnership between the University of California Berkeley and the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
In another study, more than two- thirds of graduate students reported low wellbeing, and about a third said they’ve experienced signs of anxiety or depression.
“Pre- pandemic, we were seeing stress as being the number one ( mental health) issue that students had,” said Michael London, the CEO and founder of Uwill. “But what has concerned me since the pandemic is that stress has evolved into a more severe anxiety and in many cases, depression.”
The platform’s technology addresses the issues by matching students with several professionals. Users can then choose therapists based on their availability, specialization, gender and background. The counselors represent 16 ethnicities and speak nine languages.
The range of options could contribute to teletherapy’s continued relevance on campus, long after the pandemic ends and most students return to in- person learning, its supporters said.
“A Black woman may want a Black female therapist,” London said. “Is that realistic that a college with three therapists could have that? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”
London called expanded health options “the bright side” of the pandemic crisis: Remote learning forced higher education institutions and education technology companies to innovate, and students responded.
“That’ll make people healthier and more productive students or members of society,” he said.