What to expect

We have a team of professionals across all locations ready to meet students every day, and we regularly will see 30+ students each weekday. We know same day access decreases suicide by reducing the time between a student’s choice to seek help and connection to a mental health professional. Clinicians who are available for that first appointment are named Access clinicians.

You come to counseling services to gain insight and get help on areas of your life where you may be stuck. Getting unstuck usually involves feeling new feelings, challenging thoughts and beliefs and trying new things. We do a few things to help you be in charge of how and when your change takes place. First, we co-create goals with you. We’ll help you set a pace for reaching your goal. If your goal requires a professional with a specialty, or a period of time to reach, we’ll say so. If it is difficult to reach your goal while defending a dissertation or preparing for finals week, we’ll help you craft a goal that works for your moment in time. We’ll help you define a goal that you believe you can reach, that honors all of the other goals you have in your current life.

We are a center that professionally trains doctoral and masters students in the fields of psychology, counseling, social work and marriage and family therapy. We may suggest a solution path that involves a training professional. We provide close supervision and mentoring to all training professionals, and all of their work is connected to a licensed professional on our staff. Your consent is necessary to work with a training professional, and the name of the licensed professional will be provided to you. Our client satisfaction feedback suggests no difference in felt experience between training professionals and licensed professionals.

What if your only available time for brief therapy is 9 p.m. at night? What if you have decided that telehealth works best for your schedule? We have solutions. We work across all physical locations, and across telehealth platforms to offer as many possibilities to match the schedule and platform you need.

Counseling works when you as a client trust your clinician. Trust is built through high quality care, through language, and through feeling that your clinician understands you. We work as hard as we can to ensure that you feel this trust with everyone you meet at Counseling Services. Additionally, we work to have as diverse of a team as possible to serve 75,000 students who may connect best with a wide variety of clinician personalities, styles, skills and lived experiences. We invite trust into our conversations with you, with a goal of helping you to find the right fit.

We seek feedback through multiple forms. In session we ask if you are getting what you need. Following sessions we send customer satisfaction surveys, which are anonymous. Counseling only works when you believe it is helpful. If at any point you don’t believe our services are helpful, please tell us. This helps us to better serve you by identifying what is not working. We will work to resolve what you identify, or find new solutions that get you back on track with your goals.

We are a confidential environment and your privacy is our priority. Confidentiality begins once students sign paperwork. Student written consent is required prior to sharing any information with others, including whether a student ever came to counseling. The only exceptions are for students who are under 18, parent consent is required after a same day appointment, and if a student has risk that would be life threatening. In those situations, we review student options and our ethical obligations, collaborating with students on ways to build safety into their immediate life.

We offer immediate support, emergency response, brief interventions, coordinated care, outreach and education and resources for free. We don’t charge student accounts for any individual service and we don’t charge insurance.

We live in a large metropolitan city full of clinical experts in every area of mental health. If we believe there is a provider in the community that is an expert in what you need, we may recommend that expert. We spend time building relationships with the wider mental health community, to ensure we build a strong web to support 75,000 students across 100 miles in the greater Phoenix area.