A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through my school’s Discrete Math and Probability Theory (CS 70) Piazza when one post caught my eye. Amidst a sea of “Final Grade” and “[Spring 2019 Final] Question 1a” posts, the title stood out: Mental Health Counseling Idea for Computer Science Mentors (CSM). I opened the post and read it in its entirety. When I finished it, I thought to myself, “Darn, she is right.”
We may joke about depression on UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens and Overheard at Berkeley, but when the endless all-nighters pulled and tears shed become real, it’s not funny.
The Problem
UC Berkeley is internationally acclaimed for its stellar academics, the proud home of many Nobel Prize and Turing Award winners. What is not as well known as the culture of high achievement is a culture of high stress. Ranked among the 50 most stressful colleges, the university often witnesses students sacrifice their physical and mental health for the glory of good grades on coursework, a high paying job, or even club recruitment. Libraries are constantly packed with students slaving away at essays or cramming for exams, from the early hours of dawn to well past midnight. Students often skip sleep or socializing in order to get in a few more hours of studying.
The stress-inducing culture is particularly rampant in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department. Certain professors have raised ire for encouraging an 80-hour workweek spread among four technical courses and leaving room for little else. Freshmen and sophomore students often worry about whether they will be able to meet the 3.3 GPA cap for declaring Computer Science. The department Piazza is flooded with posts from students asking if they can take two technical courses, intern, and do research over the summer at the same time (the answer is no). Most devastatingly, the anxiety has permeated into our social lives. Many students have noted that most of their conversations with friends in the department have revolved around some combination of coursework, jobs, interviews, or grad school apps.
The Proposed Solution
Computer Science Mentors (CSM) has been offering small group mentoring to students in lower division EECS courses for years. Students have flocked to CSM sections as a safe space to ask questions and connect with other supportive peers within the EECS community. However, CSM has not had a formal program where students can sit down with a mentor, talk about their struggles, and receive some personalized mental health guidance. Therefore, the author of the Piazza post suggested that CSM should provide one-on-one counseling sessions. She noted that much of the cheating and lack of motivation this semester was due to “the pandemic and struggling to keep focused and excited about material when so much is going wrong in the world,” and counseling could help alleviate those fears. She also pointed out that while the school does offer counseling and psychiatric services, those services are often overcrowded, as Berkeley is a large university.
The basic structure of her proposed counseling session is as follows:
- Student signs up for a counseling session on a custom web platform.
- The mentor either meets up with the student at a quiet location on campus (assuming shelter in place is lifted) or conducts the session through phone call or Zoom.
- The mentor starts off with a quick psychiatric questionnaire.
- The student tells the mentor about his/her problems; the mentor listens and gives some advice on how to handle the issues. If necessary, the mentor refers the student to professional services.
Some Downsides of the Proposed Solution
Though the spirit of her idea is commendable, most mentors in CSM do not have any formalized training in psychiatric counseling. Psychiatric counseling requires years of education, with most psychiatrists obtaining a MD degree and training for three to seven years afterwards. Even non-professional counselors, such as Student to Student Peer Counseling at Berkeley, have to go through a semester’s worth of training and be evaluated before they begin counseling.
Proper training is especially important, considering that many students will be seeking help on very serious and private issues. It is therefore vital that these sessions maintain confidentiality. Mentors should also work to make counseling sessions a safe, nonjudgmental environment in order for students to feel comfortable sharing. Diversity training is also critical for mentors who will be interacting with a student body diverse in race, gender, and sexual orientation, amongst many other factors. In addition to maintaining confidentiality, mentors will also need to be knowledgable on different mental health issues, such as common mental disorders and stress management.
Some Revisions to the Proposed Solution
Since CSM does not necessarily have the budget or years’ or even semesters’ worth of time to train mentors in formal psychiatric counseling, we could rebrand the sessions as one-on-one sessions or cabin chats, similar to those that some course staff put on. Students are more than welcome to share with us any struggles, be it mental health or otherwise, but we should emphasize that we are only offering informal advice and support, and our sessions should not be a substitute for professional psychiatric services. Since we need to be able to scale our service to cater to potentially thousands of students, we could also offer group sessions where a group of students with some common issue meet with a mentor to discuss solutions. Even better, since students are oftentimes more comfortable opening up with each other than with an authority figure, we could offer support groups, where groups of students with common issues meet up and discuss solutions amongst themselves, with the mentor as a mediator that steps in with some advice.
Especially with the current COVID-19 crisis, the need for human connection between socially isolated and stressed students is greater than ever. Students need a person who can be their light through a dark tunnel, whether it be the anxiety brought on by the pandemic, stress caused by schoolwork, or loneliness caused by social distancing. CSM, with its enthusiastic mentors who love to give back to their community, is the perfect group of students to kickstart this initiative of making the EECS community more supportive and inclusive and less stressed. It is our hope that one day, those depressing memes of stress culture at UC Berkeley EECS can be replaced with fond memories of students caring for one another and valuing their health.