The Chronicle of Higher Education includes an article: “A University’s New Approach to Student Mental Health: Put Therapists in the Dorms.” 

Regina Ray’s commute to work as a mental-health counselor at Virginia Tech is a three-minute walk.

Ray isn’t your typical campus therapist: She’s an embedded counselor in the university’s residence halls. 

“Living around your clients” does make for a unique experience, she said. 

“Having to give that disclaimer has been very interesting, especially when I’m like, ‘Hey, by the way, we do live on campus, so you may see us.’”

Hiring embedded counselors like Ray had a two-fold purpose for Virginia Tech. Administrators wanted to make it easier for students to access mental-health services. They also wanted to take some pressure off resident assistants, or RAs, in responding to their peers’ mental-health crises. In recent years, RAs have increasingly tended to students’ complex psychological issues late at night when other resources are unavailable, even though they lack professional training.

At Virginia Tech, the majority of the 10,000 students who live on campus are first-year undergraduates in the midst of transitioning to college — a stressful time when mental-health concerns often surface.

In the fall of 2021, Virginia Tech reorganized its residential-life program to focus more closely on student well-being and to incorporate other departments in student affairs, including the counseling center and living-learning programs. The overhaul included reimagining the RA role as “residential well-being student leaders.” Instead of being assigned halls within a dorm, student leaders were organized into trios serving between 110 and 150 students.

The university also created the embedded-counseling program. Ray and three other professional mental-health counselors started in the fall of 2022.

It’s a huge support to RAs because they have so many more easy resources to refer a resident to. The counselors live in one of the dorms assigned to them and work at a central office in the residential part of campus. They offer drop-in consultation, crisis response, and short-term individual and group therapy after hours. And they serve as connective tissue to the Cook Counseling Center, where students can receive more services.

Embedded counselors have become more common over the last five years. A handful of institutions have created such positions in athletic departments and particular academic units, hoping to target support toward specific populations.

Tapping therapists to work in residence halls, as Virginia Tech has done, is a newer approach.

With embedded counselors, the university is expanding its “tool belt” of mental-health services available to students, said Rebecca Caldwell, director of residential well-being.

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