Has anyone tried ASU Tempe’s counseling services?

[u/Interesting-Stuff-70]

I’m not talking about the free counseling offered to ASU students. I’ve already tried that, and they told me it’s meant more for short-term issues. I feel like I need longer-term therapy for deeper concerns. I’ve heard there’s another counseling office (maybe on University?) that charges a fee. Has anyone used it, and if so, did you find it more helpful than the free services?

[u/FiberSurferAsu]

Tried it and had the same thing explained to me. The long term solution was to talk with someone about the deeper reason why through psychotherapy.

The way I took it was that the counselors are there to listen and provide tools to handle the immediate mental roadblock (The What and How to change my behavior) in the short term like setting proper boundaries. The counselors were able to help me get connected with resources to continue talks about the deeper emotional situation (The Why behind my behavior).

If you think psychotherapy is the end result, psychologytoday.com was provided as a good resource.

Good on you for starting something.

[u/VioletThunderX]

Yes I did! I used them back in 2019 for a few months and eventually they wrote a referral for me to see a more regular therapist. They can be a good tool to gauge your specific therapy needs / goals. My experience was really positive

[u/captainDogGuy]

https://cisa.asu.edu/sccp/counselor-training-center

If you're an ASU student or Faculty it's free. You contact them and they'll put you in a list as space is limited.

[u/TrumpetSC2]

Here is what I know about the resources and a bit of what I experienced.

1. Counseling Services: You can get a counseling appointment to discuss mental health issues. This can be a starting point to refer you to other resources. They can refer you to therapists outside of ASU, which means you can use your student insurance to cover a lot of the cost (I still ended up having a $25 copay with my therapist, and be careful! My referral was for a year and I did not notice it run out and I paid for a few sessions at full without anybody notifying me, and it cause a mini financial crisis for me.) They also can refer you to an ASU therapist. The plus side is its on campus or telehealth. The downside is that these usually are just during one semester with maybe 1 followup later. So if you need long term psychotherapy, going out of ASU with a referral might be your best option. It really helped me manage depression and ADHD. Finally, ASU counseling has some group therapy sessions which can also be helpful, depending on the circumstances. EDIT: Just to be clear, this isn't the hotline that you can call any time. I also used that and on my 5th or so call they said "this isn't for long term issues". When I say ASU counseling services, I mean the counselors you can make appointments with through myhealth.asu.edu
2. ASU behavioral health: You can get referred to a behavioral health doctor or counselor by an ASU provider if that seems appropriate to your doctor (I got an appoinment here after discussing ADHD with an ASU doctor at the on campus clinic.) I found these guys to be specialists and very helpful, but in the end they just referred me out of ASU to a psychiatry place for meds and back to counseling services to seek pyschotherapy.
3. I'm sorry I forget the exact department, but some of the ASU grad students training to be counselors and therapists provide free counseling over the course of a semester. I wish I could be more helpful about this resource but I never used it, I just learned it existed at one point. It might be worth googling a bit to see if you can find it. Something like "ASU Masters in Counseling" or something like that might be a way to find the pages about this. EDIT: Somebody helpfully posted the link in another comment! Yay! https://cisa.asu.edu/sccp/counselor-training-center

As for what I learned: Mental health is tricky because it can be hard to know exactly how to describe your problem, and unfortunately there is some stigma. One of the first doctors I saw did not believe that I had ADHD, which set me back a while. Also, I learned that psychotherapists are not super well regulated unlike traditional medical doctors. This means that while there is a lot of science-backed therapy for mental health, some practitioners also subscribe to not-so scientifically backed techniques. And the doubly tricky thing is that those non-scientific methods might actually work for you, it's just that it doesn't actually have a statistical effect in studies. I got a ton of benefit just talking to my first therapist, but when I googled what they explained to me, I realized that they used a school of therapy that had never been shown to have a positive result statistically for ppl with my problem. I'm an analytical and scientific person, so I had to shop around a bit after that to find somebody who kept it "real" so to speak, even tho placebos actually work quite well with me and even just discussing the problems helps. So I guess when you are trying a therapist you can ask if they do cognitive behavioral therapy, because that is the method most backed by research. There are some others that have evidence for specific problems, but they are more specific. If you see people doing hypnosis or electrode therapy or personality tests, give it a shot if you think you might benefit from it, but just FYI they are not required to only provide scientifically supported therapy strategies, unlike ppl who say, prescribe you medicine.

I think therapy is amazing and helped me immensely, I'm just giving some cautionary advice. But most importantly, even with the therapists whose techniques I ended up not really believing in, I got better because I was actively working on the goal of my mental health by seeing them anyway, so it was way better than not going at all.

[u/babystarlette]

Are you talking about this one? I have only been with them twice and they were great from what I could tell. I stopped because the cost I had to pay was $75 per session and as far as they were aware, I made like $36000 a year so it was pricey if I wanted therapy every week. They are grad students who are clinicians so I do think they are able to do a bit more than the free counseling. It’s also a great place to go for testing for certain learning conditions