MADISON, Wis. (AP) University of Wisconsin System students seeking mental health counseling are routinely forced to wait a week or longer to get appointments and that delay is likely to increase, a report warned Friday.
The UW System report also said counselors should do more to monitor troubled students who are referred to off-campus mental health providers for advanced treatment. Those students do not always end up getting help, and some campuses do little to follow up, the report said.
The report comes in the wake of last year’s massacre at Virginia Tech, where a troubled student killed 32 others before committing suicide. That tragedy served as a wake-up call for colleges to do more to help students showing signs of potentially dangerous behavior; one focus has been to refer more students to counseling early.