The on-campus Personal Growth and Counseling Center (PGCC) at Cal State Monterey Bay (CSUMB) aims to service students in more ways than one. The center works as a hub for mental health and wellness support, offering services like brief individual therapy sessions and mental wellbeing workshops, as well as other forms of mental health support.
“We support students with their mental health, with their physical health and well being, relationships, academic success. Basically we support students with a lot of different things,” said Clinical and Outreach Lead for the PGCC, Jessica Lopez. Some of the center’s most utilized resources include their individual brief therapy, which allows students to meet with a licensed therapist during one-on-one sessions onsite or over Zoom, and their various workshops and support groups that the center offers.
“We have a workshop called Building Mental Wellness, that’s really a great workshop for folks who maybe feel like they don’t have what they need to cope with big emotions,” said Lopez. “We also have an outdoor stress management workshop, that’s a lovely opportunity for students to learn mindfulness skills and actually practice them.”
Alongside this, the PGCC also offers opportunities for students and staff to become trained and certified mental health helpers through a team of mental health trainers known as Otter Care.
“The mission of Otter Care is to promote emotional well-being, encourage help seeking behavior and strengthen resilience by fostering connectedness throughout the campus community,” according to the PGCC website. Through Otter Care, students and staff can enroll into two different mental health centered trainings; one being the Mental Health First Aid training, a seven-hour intensive that teaches the warning signs of mental health crises as well as strategies for responding to crisis. Also available, the Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR) training is an hour long suicide prevention training that teaches students and staff the warning signs of suicide, how to approach and ask someone about suicide and how to encourage someone to seek help. “You get certified in [mental health first aid] for three years… and then we have QPR. It’s only an hour, we offer that a couple times each month,” said Lopez.
A common misconception held by students regarding mental health services – including the PGCC – is that these services are expensive. This can affect a student’s decision to seek assistance, so Lopez aims to inform students about the true cost of services offered by the PGCC.
“Students pay one mental health fee each semester, and then after that there’s no extra charge. So there’s no copay or, ya know, there’s no, ‘oh because you’ve been seen x amount of times, you owe this amount,’ it’s one fee,” said Lopez.
The fee is labeled under CSUMB tuition receipts as the “Student Mental Health Services Fee,” and is included in each student’s tuition every semester. Lopez urges students to get the most out of the mental health services provided in their tuition, with the first step being to enroll for a PGCC appointment. This can be done anytime Monday through Thursday from 1 to 4 p.m at Building 80, 6012 General Jim Moore – between University police and North Quad dormitories. Students previously enrolled with the PGCC can call the center Monday through Friday at (831-582–3969) between 8:30 a.m and 5:00 p.m to set an appointment.
“We don’t want you to wait until your symptoms get worse, we don’t want you to wait til there’s a crisis,” Lopez said. “We want you to come in, that’s why we’re called ‘personal growth and counseling center.’”