About the RIC Counseling Center
The mission of the Counseling Center is to support our diverse student body to fully develop their intellectual, emotional, and social potential. Through high quality professional and confidential services, we aim to reduce distress, promote emotional wellness, enhance life satisfaction, and improve overall well-being. Outreach programming supports the entire campus community and we engage in collaboration with campus partners toward suicide prevention and mental health awareness.
"When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as 'rootless and stemless.' We treat it as a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is."
- W. Timothy Gallwey
- We provide high quality, flexibly short-term individual counseling and psychotherapy to over 400 students each year. Our responsiveness and flexibility have enabled us to avoid a waiting list.
- We practice “community psychology”! Last year we had contact with over 2000 RIC students in workshops, presentations, & outreach events. We consult often with faculty and staff about students they are concerned about, part of our “safety net” strategy. We play a leading role in suicide and sexual violence prevention on campus.
- Our Counseling Center seeks to provide a warm and accepting space and atmosphere. We believe we do that better than most. . We feel honored to work with our students and inspired by them. Our clients consistently rate their counselors and their counseling experience as extremely positive, and many report that counseling was instrumental in both continuing their education and improving their grades.
- Our clinical training program, affiliated with the William James College, was 1 of 5 sites selected from among 75 to be a founding member of a consortium of training sites that has been awarded approval by the American Psychological Association. This program significantly increases our capacity to provide high quality mental health care for RIC students.
- The approaches to counseling used by our staff and students span a diversity of perspectives, yet there is also cohesiveness in our understanding of what promotes wellness and distress. Our clinicians tend to be informed by humanistic, contemporary relational psychodynamic and mindfulness-based approaches that also take into account systemic and cultural factors. This amounts to respect for the client as an important collaborator, a broad perspective that past relationships often impact and guide our current relationships with others and ourselves while balancing this with a focus on the present, and an understanding that many factors outside of us contribute to our wellbeing.
