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BY YINGJIA WANG

In print | October 4, 2007

Student Council and Counseling and Psychological Services are in the process of discussing ways that CAPS can better inform the college student body about its range of services and place within the Swarthmore campus community.

CAPS Director David Ramirez scheduled a meeting with Student Council after seeing CAPS mentioned on a “Student Council 411” brief on The Daily Gazette.

“I saw a thing in the Daily Gazette where it had 411 on Student Council, and it mentioned in there that they wanted feedback on services at CAPS, so I emailed them and suggested a meeting,” Ramirez said.

CAPS and Student Council met on Wednesday, Sept. 26 to examine ways for CAPS to increase its transparency and to improve ways of receiving feedback from students.

“Before the meeting, we brainstormed an agenda of some ideas we had,” said Student Council Secretary Meredith Firetog ‘10. We thought, ’This is what we’ve heard, these are our impressions.’ We’ve made it pretty clear that we don’t necessarily represent the student body, but we try to advocate for the student body. We came to [Ramirez] as students who could push an agenda."

Much of the meeting focused on ways for CAPS to increase its publicity and presence at Swarthmore. Student Council suggested that CAPS maintain a bulletin board in Parrish featuring biographies of each staff member that details, among other things, the member’s background in psychological services.

According to Ramirez, CAPS is generally comprised of full-time salaried staff who have been with the college for several years.

“The clinical staff consists of the therapists who have backgrounds either in psychology or social work, and then we have a consulting psychologist who consults with the therapists on cases where students are on medication or may benefit from medications,” Ramirez said. In addition to full-time staff, CAPS will also hire, in any given year, four to five clinical interns that are unpaid but are considered clinical psychotherapists.

Student Council members also mentioned that the campus community could benefit from having a clearer idea of the types of support that CAPS offers.

According to Ramirez, he was surprised by this request to categorize the services that CAPS offers because his goal has been to make CAPS as non-specific as possible.

“I was surprised they wanted me to be real specific. I try to make CAPS as non-specific and broad an invitation as possible so that anyone can see themselves accepting the invitation,” Ramirez said.

Student Council’s rationale for this request was to urge CAPS to be more transparent. “Part of what we’re pushing is for students to understand how CAPS works and to take away that daunting feeling about how students feel when they go see a therapist on campus,” Firetog said.

At the meeting, Student Council and CAPS also discussed the possibility of an open forum later this semester about CAPS. “Something we proposed at this meeting was to do an ask the psychiatrist meet and greet. Our idea is that people have to go down to Worth Health Center, and maybe it would take away some of the stress of doing that if a bunch of people from CAPS came up here to answer anonymous questions,” Firetog said. Student Council is currently working on holding this forum sometime after Fall Break.

Sexual Misconduct Advisors & Resource Team member Mark Dlugash ’08 praised the ideas brought up at the meeting.

“Worth Health Center, in general, students don’t know enough about. So, I think this is a great initiative. On the publicity side, that has been a big question in the past years. How can Worth and CAPS reach out to students? I think CAPS does have something like a third of the student body going, but any outreach they do is still a great thing,” Dlugash said.

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