The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/caps/page/2/)
Gregory Eells, the former head of Cornell’s Counseling and Psychological Services Department, died on Monday morning in Philadelphia, according to an email to faculty and staff by Vice President of Student and Campus Life Ryan Lombardi.
Gregory Eells, who has worked at Cornell Health’s Counseling and Psychological Services for 15 years, will be the executive director of CAPS at the University of Pennsylvania starting in March.
The six demands in the petition included an external review of Cornell Counseling and Psychological Services, gym membership reimbursement, improvement of the therapy referral process and others.
Hua and Kieley discussed their personal experiences with mental health, experiences interacting with Cornell’s current mental health system and their time working with the Task Force over the past year.
As part of its new initiatives, CAPS will be hiring three new therapists to help minimize wait times for appointments.
Over the past year, many people have voiced concerns about student mental health, including criticisms of the university’s clinical services and efforts to prevent suicide. Wait times for counseling services are among the challenges we at Cornell Health have been working to address. With university support we have added new therapist positions which has shortened wait times and also increased the diversity of our staff. Access to mental health care is critical, because treatment works and many students are in need of it. It’s also important to reach students who may be reluctant to walk through our doors, so our Let’s Talk program places counselors in locations around campus for walk-in consultations.
“The impact of these hires has been immediate, as wait periods for this semester are shorter than those experienced in the fall,” Ryan Lombardi wrote.
I always thought the greatest superpower anyone could wish for was the ability to speak the right words at the right time. Its potential would be substantial. Businessmen could use it to swing negotiations; socialites could use it attract the attention of others; politicians could use it to push their agenda across. And I? Well, I could use it to get me and my friends to calm down a bit.
One of the most serious threats to students’ safety at Cornell is our mental health. The administration claims to care about our well-being, but lately I’ve been seeing evidence to the contrary. A few weeks ago, I saw an article on Facebook that left me feeling frozen. The headline read, “Pollack Rejects Creation of Independent Task Force to Review Cornell’s Mental Health Policies.” I clicked the link, and you should too. I was introduced to Sophie Hack McLeod, a Cornell student who took her own life in 2016.
Student Assembly addresses shortage of mental health counseling services at its meeting on Thursday.