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Q&A
Council member inquires about mental health services in schools
6:20:49
·
71 sec
Council Member Rita Joseph asks a student about the mental health services currently available at their school. The student describes the limitations of their school's counseling department and the need for more accessible mental health support.
- The school has a small counseling department, but limited resources
- Students often don't feel comfortable approaching counselors they don't have a relationship with
- There's a need for a dedicated mental health clinic to make students feel safe and supported
Rita Joseph
6:20:49
Can you talk about the kind of mental health services that are currently available at your schools?
6:20:54
You brought that up when you were talking.
Joe Alicio
6:20:58
Yeah.
High School Student
6:21:01
Thank you for the question.
6:21:03
So here at Brookline, we do have a counseling department.
6:21:06
We are a fairly small school, so we do have mental support from our counselors, but given that we have a limited number of our counselors and not a mental health clinic, when students feel like they need help, they don't really have a place to go, especially when counselors are more folk are also dealing with college counseling as well as in addition to mental health counseling.
6:21:30
And also, the fact that not many people feel comfortable going to their counselors because they haven't had that relationship, or students at my school don't feel comfortable sharing to people that they haven't met before or haven't had that relationship.
6:21:44
So having a clinic that's specially designed to make you feel safe, make you feel comfortable, that's critical to help making sure that our students and myself feel like they're not alone in this world, which is getting increasingly increasingly dark.