Across Canadian universities, e-counselling services for students are on the rise in usage. E-counselling is a completely digital kind of mental health service that allows for students to access counselling through a variety of means: messaging, video calls, and phone calls.
Telephone and e-counselling services are being used in hopes of reducing some of the wait times at universities’ in-person counselling services, which have been frequently reported to be overworked.
But, while counselling has a new digital face, some say there isn’t enough awareness of the service and that there is a lack of data surrounding its efficacy.
Current e-counselling services
Recently, Carleton University launched Empower Me, a new counselling platform. While the service helps students arrange traditional in-person counselling in Ottawa, Empower Me also provides 24/7 counsellors reachable by phone.
Empower Me also offers video-chatting (not available through Carleton at the moment) as well as an interactive app that has resources, surveys, and activities to strengthen mental health for students.
Carleton is not the first school to invite its students to seek mental health help off-campus with primarily digital services. McGill University, York University, and Western University, to name a few, have free 24/7 hotlines listed on their websites.
Awn Duqoum, a mechatronics engineering student at the University of Waterloo (UW) and a heavily involved campus leader, said he was hoping his school would start up a 24/7 telephone counselling program. He said he has used his campus’ counselling services a few times.
“Unfortunately there are a lot of processes to be in place before a service like that can be happen,” he said.
“There’s a lot of liabilities and a lot of agreements and a lot of contingency plans that need to be written up.”
The service provided by Waterloo is called Good2Talk. A similar service, independent of the school, a crisis support line called Here 24/7—exclusively for the Waterloo region—is also listed on UW’s health and counselling websites.
Good2Talk is funded by the province as a part of the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development’s Mental Health and Innovation Fund. It was launched in 2013.
Awareness of these services
Empower Me is new at Carleton, and although students received an email a few weeks ago to announce its launch, it’s still surprising news to Carleton student Ti-Amo Richards.
Richards played football for the Ravens during his first year, but after his fifth concussion, he found himself depressed and unable to continue. He has since seen Carleton’s sports’ psychiatrist and is open about his struggles with mental health.
“I had no idea about Carleton’s 24/7 mental health hotline,” Richards said. “It sounds like a good idea based on the fact that if someone is willing to listen to what’s going on in your head, it’s a huge help.”
With wait times at Carleton’s appointment-based counselling reaching up to six weeks, and drop-in counselling filling up as early as noon (registration begins at 10:45 and is supposed to go until 3:15), a service like Empower Me is in high demand on campus.
While Empower Me is a new counselling platform at Carleton, telephone counselling and e-counselling isn’t new.
Similar services made available to students include Good2Talk and Therapy Assisted Online (TAO) which are resources listed on Carleton’s health and counselling website. While Good2Talk is open to anyone in Ontario at a post-secondary institution, TAO is a platform that requires a login using students’ school email and password.
David Kydd is the assistant program head of family and community social services at the University of Guelph and a registered psychotherapist in practice for over 20 years. He administers in-person and over-the-phone counselling to his own clients, as well as to anonymous callers.
“It’s hard to cover the complexity of a human being over the phone,” he said.
“There’s a level of intimacy when you’re meeting face-to-face that allows you to develop a therapeutic relationship with a client faster than you would over the phone,” Kydd added, “I think it’s easier to communicate precisely when you’re face-to-face with a client than it is over the phone because you have a lot more tools you can use face-to-face.”
The Ontario Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Services notes on their website that “evidence for e-mental health is emerging and, to date, demonstrates the potential to engage young people, and deliver outcomes that are as good if not better than services as usual.”
However, the website also acknowledges that “substantial gaps exist in the evidence base underlying e-mental health programs, especially regarding mobile applications. Much of what is currently available has not been evaluated.”
In 2015 the Globe and Mail reported on a study done on the effectiveness of delivering cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) using online assessments and tools in combination with in-person sessions.
The study found an 82 per cent failure rate when these online tools were used without the face-to-face meetings.
There is a need for further study in terms of e-counselling’s measured success and effectiveness in Canadians, but that does not seem to stifle the demand for more accessible counselling services.
Kydd noted some of the limitations of over-the-phone counselling and other forms of e-counselling, saying he would not administer sessions to more than one person at a time (couple/relationship/family counselling), and he wouldn’t use it to treat patients with thought disorders such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Duqoum’s counselling of choice is in the form of peer mentorship, and it is a program that the University of Waterloo (UW Mates) offers to alleviate wait times in counselling services, as well as to build community among students.
Duqoum says a combination of over-the-phone counselling as well as in-person sessions could be appropriate.
“I don’t think you can have one or the other, because there is a lot of diversity in the students that you are going to help,” Duqoum said.
“Some people need to have that face-to-face conversation to feel that community, to have that connection so I would recommend having those office hours for those students, but for other students it is intimidating for them to go into office hours to go into an office to talk to someone, so phone counselling could work.”
“I think (phone and e-counselling) could be one of the tools in a university’s toolbox,” Kydd said.
“It works for when a client is unwilling to come in. I can see a place for it in the university counselling setting, but I think it would be ideal if a client could choose the modality of their counselling.”
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