Lack of Administrative Transparency Mars Counselling Program
In late January, students receiving mental health counselling services at the law school were dealt a blow with the news that the position of the only remaining on-site counsellor, Salima Jadavji, had been eliminated. The email offered little indication of any certain future for the counselling program.
In an interview with Ultra Vires, Assistant Dean Alexis Archbold said that the staffing structure for mental health counselling would be changing from a counsellor hired and supervised by the law school to one from the University of Toronto’s central Health & Wellness department. According to Assistant Dean Archbold, “full-time counselling will resume, as it would have at the law school, in August of 2020.” This was framed as a commitment. With appointments with Salima ceasing at the end of March, if not earlier, this will leave students without an on-site counsellor during the exam period and into the spring. During this time, law students will, according to Assistant Dean Archbold, have priority access to the embedded counsellor at Hart House. The future of Yukimi Henry’s former role in terms of health promotion and programming will “probably” be announced in the summer.
For those keeping track, this means that students seeing Salima will be transferred to another counsellor for 2-3 months, and then presumably back to another counsellor beginning in August. This is, of course, no way to build a clinical relationship upon which mental health progress may be established.
The loss of Yukimi, the law school’s full-time counsellor, last summer came as a great surprise. For many, having a counsellor who was both familiar with the law school system and located at the law school was a huge support. One 2L student* said having someone at the faculty “made me feel very safe.” Another student found it helpful to “have somebody who could relate” to their experience. A student who had been seeing Yukimi said that, upon hearing the news, “I was quite shocked, and I was waiting with bated breath to see what the school would come up with in her absence.” Yet, no replacement came. This student characterized the failure of the administration to provide a suitable replacement counsellor as “negligent.”
SLS representatives on the Dean’s Mental Health and Wellness Committee were similarly surprised. One representative from each cohort sits on this committee, and together they have the role of, in part, bringing student concerns to the administration. A representative said that at the end of the prior school year, they finished committee meetings on the assumption that Yukimi would be returning. It is unclear when exactly the administration knew about Yukimi’s departure. But for the representatives, “we were made aware of it basically when she left, and have since then been trying to make sure that something is replacing her.” After SLS representatives raised concerns, the administration reassured them that they were working on it, but did not provide further details as it was an HR issue. Ultimately, “we didn’t get answers basically until Alexis sent that email out about Salima leaving.” Despite pushing for clarity at every committee meeting in the fall term, even SLS representatives were kept in the dark, along with the rest of the student body.
In response to both my questions and the concerns raised by SLS, the administration deferred, saying the decisions were “HR matters,” on which they could not comment. The SLS representative understands this reasoning—as keeping students out of hiring decisions is university policy—and agrees that students should not be part of those processes. However, they also commented, “Whether HR is just a euphemism for, ‘we don’t want you to be involved,’ is unclear.” The decision to remove Salima, and by extension, all on-site counselling services for six months, is not merely an HR issue. This termination has implications for all of the students who were seeing her, and the stability of their mental health treatment.
The administration’s lack of transparency is troubling, given that, according to Assistant Dean Archbold, these changes are the product of a “very thoughtful discussion that’s been going on for quite some time” involving “the law school and the broader university community.” Evidently the discussion was not so thoughtful as to include student representatives in order to gauge the effect of multiple interruptions to counselling services. According to Assistant Dean Archbold, consultation was not warranted, because “the services we’re providing are going to be almost exactly the same, as far as students will experience them.” Yet the administration’s conclusions about the student experience of these changes were made without any input from students themselves. The issue may not just be availability of any counsellor, but access to a stable counselling relationship with an individual who is able to respond to the unique concerns of law students.
SLS pushed for answers for months after Yukimi’s departure. Yet, the administration gave little indication of what was to come next: “We were told that things were happening, but because they were HR issues, they weren’t things that students could be part of.” They were told that the administration had been trying to restructure the system, so that it could be more integrated with broader U of T services. Their discussions indicated that integration would allow the counsellor to more easily refer students to additional resources like psychiatrists, and that the law school administration lacked the “professional capacity” to oversee a counsellor, as an “ethical concern.” However, it’s unclear why this did not arise over the ten previous years that the law school has been working on student mental health, a figure cited by Assistant Dean Archbold.
Regarding Salima’s termination and the subsequent service change, the administration revealed that the decision had been made at some point before December: “We were careful around the fact that we were in the exam period, and that announcing something in December during exams…didn’t really seem like a good idea.” An email sent by Assistant Dean Archbold on December 3, 2019, encouraged students to make appointments with Salima. This was sent despite knowing that students who made appointments for the first time would not be able to build a long-term counselling relationship if needed, functionally setting them up for significant upheaval. Assistant Dean Archbold said, “We provided as long a runway as we possibly could…with at least two months’ notice.” However, as some students reported it taking several weeks to get an appointment with Salima, the notice was not as long as it seemed.
The question that remains is where this leaves students needing support. Students may have priority access to the Hart House counsellor, but this may not be sufficient. Some students have tried to access external counselling. However, the significant expense meant that some had to rely on family support to afford it, if they had the benefit of such support. Regarding the UTSU health plan, which covers only $100 per session for up to 15 sessions, one student said, “That will get me nothing, to be honest. Most good psychologists charge way more than that.” Limiting coverage to 15 sessions also seems to contemplate an end to the regular and ongoing therapy that some students require.
Others may try to seek out services through the central Health & Wellness system. However, some have been dissuaded by negative prior experiences seeking medical care through U of T, which they found “an extremely difficult process,” and even resulted in misdiagnosis.
Furthermore, students have found that counsellors from central Health & Wellness cannot effectively respond to the unique needs of law students. One 2L student who went to such a counsellor felt dismissed, because she was not in a critical depressive condition, and felt that the counsellor could not understand her concerns about employment in a law school context.
With regards to central Health & Wellness counsellors, Assistant Dean Archbold focused on proximity, saying that Hart House is “not as convenient…but it’s a three-minute walk away.” However, this neglects the broader issue that SLS representatives have raised about speaking to a counsellor who “understands the context in which your problems are happening.” “We’ve really pushed hard on that,” they said, “to make sure they understand that it’s not just an issue of distance or laziness.”
Relying on the Peer Mental Health Program is not a viable long-term option. Students volunteering with the program felt that “[Yukimi] was supposed to be supporting it, but it ended up being a kind of replacement because she had to leave.” Furthermore, students lack the professional training to respond effectively to peers who need significant support. A 1L student feels like the administration is “pushing that responsibility onto other law students that also have a lot going on,” and feels uncomfortable approaching other students due to the lack of privacy.
Ultimately, some students have been left with no plan for their mental health treatment, as if the services didn’t exist at all. One student formerly seeing Salima said, “Currently I don’t have any mental health support, professionally.”
The interruptions in counselling services over the past year have led to some losing confidence in the administration entirely. “I’ve lost faith,” said a 2L student. In response to the administration’s claim that counselling would return in August, another student said, “That doesn’t seem like it will actually happen.”
It is clear that the lack of transparency on the part of the administration regarding the changes to the counselling program has left students feeling lost. For the administration to commit seriously to the faculty’s Mental Health Strategic Action Plan, it must engage with students on these decisions not only in a reactive way, when pressed by students, but proactively, in a manner that does not hide behind the cloak of “HR matters.”
The SLS representative emphasized that the members of the Dean’s Committee have genuinely good intentions to support students. However, in this writer’s opinion, this cannot be come without a transparent process of engagement. This is particularly important when students are already facing the pressures of cut-back student health plans—one wonders whether this is an appropriate time to allow multiple major upheavals in access to counselling.
If the administration finds my characterization of their plans inadequate in any way, I encourage them to take the leadership to clearly announce these changes themselves, rather than requiring a student writer to dig them out through an interview. Furthermore, if they are truly committed to that “healthy community” so proudly vaunted in the Action Plan, they must address the prevailing environment in which students will only speak out about their experiences with mental health services on condition of anonymity, out of fear of retaliation by the administration upon which their future career may depend. As one student said, “I don’t want the school to put me on their blacklist, like they did that [alumnus].”
No one who has had experience seeking mental health services could have devised this policy. Moving students from the on-site counsellor, to a Hart House counsellor, to a new counsellor in August, critically interrupts the clinical relationship in a way that may impede progress and cause further distress. Assistant Dean Archbold emphasizes, “We remain really committed to providing great services to our students”. She claims that these changes do not diminish their commitment to mental health. This is an opportunity for the administration to demonstrate their goodwill by moving forward with transparency and accountability. Their students depend on it.
*Editor’s Note: Students in this piece have been anonymized for their privacy.
