Health and Wellness Offers New Mental Health Service
At the start of the 2019 fall semester, Health and Wellness Services introduced a new service known as MySSP. MySSP provides various mental health services via an app, available to all Sarah Lawrence students, both undergraduate and graduate, regardless of their health insurance. The College has covered the cost of MySSP, which means that all of its services are entirely free for students.
Most of what MySSP provides is virtual therapy, which comes in a few different forms. Sessions may be conducted over call, instant message, or secure video chat. They can be immediate, one-time conversations, or they can be a series of scheduled sessions over time, which would mirror traditional, in-person talk therapy. All sessions, regardless of their form, are with actual, licensed therapists. MySSP and its services are available 24/7 year-round; thus, students are able to use it even when classes are not in session, which allows them to access support even when the Health and Wellness Center is closed. MySSP is also available to students who are abroad or on an exchange program.
Dina Nunziato, Health and Wellness’s Director of Counseling and Psychological Services, described MySSP as a “virtual clinic.” She emphasized that it’s different from a hotline (typically an anonymous service) in that students need to register for the service in order to access counseling. When students download the app, they will be asked a number of basic questions, such as their name, phone number and school, in order to begin using the app. Once a student chooses to contact MySSP for counseling, they will then have the option of choosing between immediate, one-time support or ongoing therapy sessions.
“Because they’ve been in existence for a very long time,” Nunziato said, “and they started out many, many years ago as an employee assistance program for large corporations, they are connected. They have a network of therapists that is national.” Due to this wide range of available therapists, students have some level of choice regarding the clinician with whom they speak. MySSP offers six different languages: English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Chinese, and Korean. They can also request a therapist with a specialization in a certain area related to mental health, such as anxiety or relationship issues.
In addition to its various counseling services, MySSP also contains a number of articles relating to mental health. These are sorted into five different sections: “featured,” “student life,” “health,” “living away” and “relationships.” MySSP’s articles, as well as their counseling services, are specifically geared towards the needs and interests of college students.
According to Director of Medical Services Mary Hartnett, the College’s health insurance broker, University Health Plans, brought the service to Health and Wellness’s attention. Health and Wellness researched the service and found that other colleges reported having positive experiences with it. Hartnett said that Health and Wellness “saw that it actually could be a good fit for our students. We worked with the administration here at the College to provide them with this information. Our recommendation was that we move ahead with this service and the College agreed.”
Health and Wellness has taken a gradual approach to “rolling out” the service. All students have been automatically enrolled in MySSP since September 1st; however, Health and Wellness has “rolled out” MySSP to specific groups within the Sarah Lawrence community. Nunziato defined “roll out” as to “train and provide information”; that is, the service has been advertised to everyone, but certain groups of students have received information about and instruction on how to use MySSP from Health and Wellness in person. So far, the service has been formally rolled out to all the first-year students (both undergraduate and graduate) and to the resident advisors. Additionally, Health and Wellness has assisted individual students who have sought to use the service. Dons have also been made aware of MySSP.
Nunziato reported that Health and Wellness has received mostly positive feedback from students regarding their experiences with MySSP. She recalled one or two students who felt that MySSP had taken too long to respond to their requests; however, Nunziato reached out to MySSP, who then reached out to the student(s) to amend the situation right away. “We feel good about the company,” Nunziato said, “and they are committed to offering our students a really good service.”
Zoe Patterson ‘20