Before reading: If you are currently struggling, you are not alone, and support is available. This article is not meant to discourage you from seeking support from CMHS. Reaching out is always worth it. Tufts CMHS (after hours): (617) 627-3360 National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or Text 988 The Samaritans Statewide Hotline (Massachusetts): Call or Text (877) 870-4673
Every year, 25% of Tufts students seek mental health support through Counseling and Mental Health Services (CMHS). These students seek to navigate academic pressure, personal loss, anxiety, or the slower, harder-to-name weight of trying to hold everything together.
One senior in Arts and Sciences described going through exactly that process after finding herself overwhelmed last fall. “I was struggling with some issues in my personal life that made the level of overwhelm feel impossible to handle on my own,” she said. After browsing available clinicians on the CMHS website, she found one whose profile seemed like a good fit.
Then, she waited. A month passed before she was able to see a clinician.
What greets students seeking treatment is a system shaped by a fundamental constraint. Roughly two dozen licensed clinicians serve the entire Tufts population.
When students begin therapy at CMHS, clinicians typically introduce two ideas early on: the importance of therapeutic fit and the short-term nature of the model itself. CMHS is built to help students stabilize, work through a defined problem, or develop coping strategies, not to provide indefinite treatment. Students who are deemed to need longer-term support are referred to therapeutic offices off campus. The senior said her counselor was upfront about this procedure from the start. “It was explained to me that this was a model meant to help me get to the next stage of care that I needed, if it was necessary for me to continue counseling.”
In another student’s case, sessions ran every other week from late November through the end of the spring semester, a structure they appreciated but found limiting. “I would have rather had weekly sessions,” they said. “But clinicians at Tufts have unreasonable workloads, and I understand that they cannot accommodate for every specific need of each individual student.”
That constraint reflects a national shift in university counseling that accelerated over the past two decades as demand surged well beyond what campus staffing could absorb. As caseloads grew, institutions moved toward brief intervention and triage: spread resources thinner to reach more students, and connect those with longer-term needs to outside providers.
The logic holds up to a point. “I think some issues students are facing could be addressed with short-term therapy,” this senior said. “My immediate feelings of overwhelm were addressed well.”
The generation now enrolling in universities has a different relationship to mental health than those before it. Therapy is not a last resort or a source of stigma; mental health awareness is a normal part of managing wellbeing; and many students arrive at college already in therapy or expecting to be.
That cultural shift is visible at Tufts, and student organizations have played a meaningful role in sustaining it. Jillian Warsaw, an e-board member of the mental health awareness club “Active Minds” and clinical psychology major, described a community that spans well beyond any single discipline. “The nice thing about Active Minds is that it’s a bunch of people from a bunch of different majors,” she said. “From that, we’re able to hear more perspectives.”
Those perspectives reveal something consistent. “One of the things that comes up pretty often is just that people are looking for more conversation,” Warsaw said. At a school where academic pressure runs high, students who are struggling may stay quiet to maintain a putative composure, and Active Minds’s mission is to keep the conversation open regardless. But Warsaw pointed to a structural gap that runs deeper than awareness: the momentum around accessing care tends to fade after freshman year. “There are a lot of info sessions at the beginning of freshman year on how to use resources,” she said, “but that sentiment is not continued throughout the later years of college.” Transitioning out of Tufts can be as stressful as transitioning in, she argued, and more resources should be actively directed at upperclassmen.
It’s an insight that complicates the usual framing. The conversation around student mental health tends to center on incoming students. But for those approaching graduation, facing a different kind of uncertainty, the institutional scaffolding dissipates.
For students whose needs extend beyond a semester of sessions, the answer is a referral, and that transition is where the system strains most visibly. Students must independently contact providers, verify insurance coverage, and navigate waitlists, often while already in distress.
Warsaw identified two underappreciated barriers. The first is scheduling: fitting appointments into packed academic lives is harder than it sounds. “It could be difficult to make the time to prioritize your mental health, even if it’s just an hour a week,” she said. The second is geography. “A lot of people don’t have cars, and some offices are not accessible by the T,” she noted. The anonymous student shared similar sentiments: “There are a limited number of options that students have once they have to move off campus.”
There are meaningful therapeutic relationships that are lost in this transition as well. When the senior got referred off campus, her counselor helped her identify possible providers before their time together ended, but the search was still difficult, and the match she found didn’t last. “Unfortunately, the person I found turned out not to be a good fit in the long run,” she said. “I had a difficult time finding a good fit, but I feel my counselor did the best he could.” Her CMHS counselor had been an unusually good fit, and the fixed endpoint left her feeling the relationship ended before it should have. “I felt that my counselor was a much better fit than my long-term therapist, and I would have made more continuous progress had I been able to keep seeing him.”
Her conclusion was direct. “I feel that there should be options for short- or long-term counseling.” She added that cost compounds these barriers: “The school insurance isn’t [accepted] by a fair number of providers.”
There is also something structurally lost in the handoff. On-campus clinicians work within the university ecosystem, coordinating with academic advisors and residential life staff when a student is struggling on multiple fronts. One Residential Assistant described that integration firsthand: “I was able to use my experience with CMHS to help connect my freshman residents to therapy, but also [the Office of Equal Opportunity]and [the Center for Awareness, Resources and Education] CARE. All of the organizations work together to help out students, like a treatment network.” Off-campus providers, however skilled, do not carry that context.
The Residential Assistant also described a story where the mental healthcare system fell short: “When a resident was struggling, I was told there was no mental health professional on call. Just call TUPD. The officers showing up made everything worse. The resident was more distressed after they arrived than before. And the student who called the duty phone to report it, who did exactly the right thing, told me afterward that they wished they hadn’t. That’s what stuck with me the most. Someone did the right thing and was made to feel like they shouldn’t have. There should have been someone on call to handle the situation like a mental health professional would, not five armed police officers.”
Warsaw argued that Tufts should take a more active role in bridging the gap, both in helping students navigate the transition and in following up with those it knows have been struggling. “Continuing to check up on students who are having mental health issues,” she said, “and just kind of ensuring that students who have struggled in the past are doing okay now.”
But the tension it creates is sharper than it used to be. A generation ago, students who couldn’t access ongoing campus therapy mostly went without, often without framing it as an institutional failure. Today, they know what sustained care looks like, they have often already experienced it, and they notice when the system stops short. The question facing Tufts is no longer whether students are willing to seek help. It’s whether the administration is prepared to provide the kind of care they now expect, and what it would actually take to get there.
When our team reached out to CMHS for comment, the response arrived after a delay. “Unfortunately, we aren’t available to meet with you this week as it’s a busy time just prior to spring break,” wrote a CMHS staff member. “Please feel free to reach out again in the future.” It was, unintentionally, a near-encapsulation of the student experience.
Students quoted in this article were granted anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter.
Artwork by Caroline Choi