Making An Appointment

The Counseling Center  currently offers sessions that are either in-person or are telemental health (remote) through synchronous video. The initial session is in a telemental health (remote) format for RWU students within Rhode Island and who are also new to the Counseling Center. Subsequent sessions for students can be in-person or continue remotely for students within Rhode Island.  Staff and students may request wearing a mask for in-person appointments.

Call the Counseling Center at 401-254-3124 Monday through Friday from 8:30am to 5:00pm to schedule an appointment. If you reach our voicemail when you call the Center, please leave your first and last name and cell phone number. If you do not leave this information for us, we may not be able to return your call. During the academic year, appointments are available to eligible full-time RWU students and are at no cost. During the summer months, appointments are available for eligible residential RWU students who are currently taking one or more classes on campus.

If you prefer to meet with a therapist off-campus  in your local area, we suggest that you consult with your current provider and/or review both of these referral sites: Psychology Today and Zencare. You can also contact the Counseling Center at 401-254-3124 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information if you need assistance in locating an off-campus referral.

For an urgent concern on aweekday evening (after 5 pm), weekend, or a holiday, we have a service available to both RWU students themselves or any administrator, faculty, and staff member who wishes to consult about heightened emotional distress and/or a mental health difficulty of a student. Simply call the Counseling Center at 401-254-3124 after hours, follow the prompts, and you will be immediately connected to a professional who can provide crisis intervention when the Counseling Center is closed.

For EMERGENCIES, if you are on campus currently, call Public Safety (available 24/7/365) at 401-254-3333. If you are off-campus in the Bristol area, call East Bay Center (available 24/7/365) at 401-246-0700. Options for any student, regardless of where you live, include calling 911, calling 988, visiting a local hospital emergency room, and/or contacting any of these free resources available to you 24/7/365:

You will be asked to complete a set of forms prior to your first appointment. Generally, eligible students can have an appointment within 1-2 weeks of their initial request, depending on their and our schedule availability. In rare and unusual emergency circumstances, eligible students may be seen more immediately. Occasionally we are contacted by persons wanting to make an appointment, not for themselves but for a student. It is important to us that students who seek our services do so out of their own choice, so we require all students to schedule their own appointments. Appointments generally last 50 minutes in duration and occur on a regular, but not necessarily, weekly, basis. If, for whatever reason(s), you decide you want to transfer to a different counselor, you can inform your counselor or call the Center and ask the Secretary to switch counselors.

Emailing the Counseling Center

We at the Roger Williams University Counseling Center want to hear from you. However, because of the deeply personal service we provide, we also place a high value on your privacy and our ability to best serve you. Therefore, we want to take a moment to clarify the appropriate use of email as a tool in contacting us. We hope that these guidelines help you to decide the best way to reach our staff.

Services

If you are struggling with a personal problem or are concerned about someone you know, the best way to contact us is by phone at 401-254-3124. While we try to check our email regularly, you have no way of knowing if one of us is unavailable due to illness, vacation, computer problems, etc.

It is very important that we limit the use of email for comments or general questions about our services.

If your situation is urgent, RWU students are encouraged to call us or Public Safety at 401-254-3333.

Email Confidentiality

We cannot guarantee that your email will remain confidential. We will do our best to keep your communications private, but we do not have control over the flaws in Internet technology or other administrative policies regarding monitoring of email. If you are in any way concerned about the contents of your email being read by someone other than the person you are contacting, you should consider alternative ways of contacting us.

When we respond to your email, we will respond to the address from which it was sent. If you do not wish others who may have access to the email account that you are using to also have access to our response, please consider another means of communication.

What if you are not a Roger Williams University student?

We do not provide services to students who are not currently full-time Roger Williams University students or who are non-students, but we do welcome comments or questions about our services and this website.