Counseling Center services are FREE for Rhode Island College students.
H.O.P.E. Line
Students in distress can call 401-456-4673 (HOPE) to confidentially speak with licensed clinician. This service is available to students 24 hours a day/7 days a week.
We offer information on how to live a healthy lifestyle and encourage making positive behavior choices. We strive to achieve this mission by:
- Being a resource center for Rhode Island College students to obtain information and services needed to improve and maintain their health
- Advocating, creating and maintaining a community that encourages environmental, physical, social, intellectual, and emotional wellness to support a healthy lifestyle and encourage student success
- Creating and implementing health initiatives aimed to improve individual and community health at Rhode Island College.
- Collaborating with students, faculty and staff, and other organizations on and off campus to encourage and foster health initiatives on campus
- Maintaining cultural competence and expanding the understanding of the links between culture, identity, and social justice as determinants of health
- Offering confidential individual consultation and referrals for students in need
Confidentiality
There is nothing wrong with coming for counseling. In fact, we regard it as a sign of strength and often courage. Yet people sometimes hesitate because of concerns about privacy. To allay these concerns, the Counseling Center maintains a strict policy of confidentiality, in accord with the ethical rules of the American Psychological Association.
What is Counseling?
Our main goal is for you to feel both understood and cared for. After assessing the problem together, you and your counselor will try to agree on a plan to begin working on the problem. If further counseling is undertaken, it may involve only a few additional interviews or a longer series.
Although much learning in college occurs in the classroom, there is also a great deal of learning that occurs outside it. In counseling and psychotherapy, the learning is about yourself, who you really are and where you are going with your life, how to manage emotions, or how to resolve or cope with internal or interpersonal conflicts. Counseling and therapy can help renew a sense of active engagement in learning and life.
Counseling FAQs
Our Approach
The approaches to counseling used by our staff and students span a diversity of perspectives, yet there is also cohesiveness in our understanding of what promotes wellness and distress. Our clinicians tend to be informed by humanistic, contemporary relational psychodynamic and mindfulness-based approaches that also take into account systemic and cultural factors. This amounts to respect for the client as an important collaborator, a broad perspective that past relationships often impact and guide our current relationships with others and ourselves while balancing this with a focus on the present, and an understanding that many factors outside of us contribute to our wellbeing.
For Faculty & Staff
In order to encourage a campus environment conducive to growth and enrichment, the Counseling Center offers consultation to faculty and staff. The aim is to promote helpful institutional policies and the understanding of student needs, as well as constructive approaches to student difficulties, including referring students to the Counseling Center when that may be beneficial. Faculty and staff who are concerned about a student - whether to refer; how to refer; what to do about a reluctant student - can call the Center at 401-456-8094 to discuss their concerns with a counselor clinician and receive some suggestions.
