The Personal Counseling Center will offer students the free service of a psychiatrist this year.
Students will need a referral to receive this service, either from the PCC or Birkam Health Center.
To provide the service to students, the Personal Counseling Center has partnered up with Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services. Students referred to the service will be able to meet with Dr. Jayanthi Peters, who is from Indiana, virtually in the PCC on Fridays.
PCC Director Dr. Andy Slater detailed that not all referrals will go through the psychiatrist.
“Historically, the Birkam Health Center has been our referral for mental health medication, which, they do an amazing job, there’s still going to be a referral for us for just a very kind of basic course of treatment,” Slater said. “Birkam is still going to be our primary referral, and that’s due to a lot of the fact that we don’t have a lot of capacity in our psychiatrist schedule based on this arrangement.”
Slater also noted that while the psychiatrist’s service is free, any prescriptions will need to be covered by the student.
Vice President of Student Affairs Jeanine Ward-Roof felt that Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services met the criteria that were wanted in the psychiatrist.
“We really were looking specifically for the psychiatric piece and this was a place that had it,” Ward-Roof said. “So it just was something that offered to what we wanted that we were able to tailor to meet what we believe are our student’s needs and [the students will] tell us that because they’re really good at saying this is working and this isn’t.”
While the psychiatrist is a service offered, not every student who wants to see her will be able to. The psychiatrist is there as a treatment plan if counseling and Birkam cannot help the student.
“I wouldn’t want students to feel like that’s validating by any means,” Slater said. “I mean, their challenges are obviously their challenges and they’re very real. They’re coming to counseling, because their impact, it’s impacting their life. But we would want to make sure that we talk about kind of like the lower steps of treatment before we escalate them to basically what now is probably the highest, most severe category of treatment, which would be seeing our psychiatrist.”
Students should not expect an impact on their bill for this new service according to Ward-Roof.
“There’s different dollars that are allotted all over campus for different things,” Ward-Roof said. “So, what we did is when we looked at the allocations that we received for health and wellness, we decided that this was a priority that we wanted to fund in there, so it’s not an increase in terms of what we’re asking the students to pay.”
Students who need counseling can call 231-591-5968 to schedule an appointment or get more information.
Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services and Peters were unavailable for comment at the time of this article.