Marquette’s counseling center can be a stigmatized, undervalued resource on campus. We think it’s time for students and the administration to fully realize the center’s potential to help us through some of our most stressful years — college.

The mission of the counseling center is a valid one. There are hundreds of students — if not more — who could use a therapist as a person to talk to outside of their friend group, or who may need a psychiatrist to prescribe useful medication for various conditions.

The counseling center can even refer students with long-term or more serious conditions to other professionals in the area. Mental health counseling is serious business, espcially in college.

But the way Marquette’s system is currently structured is more confusing than helpful.

Currently, all full-time students can use the counseling center and are encouraged to see a therapist before seeing a psychiatrist, if necessary. However, the center’s current policies encourage a limited number of sessions with a counselor to prevent a counseling “plateau,” or point where they feel the sessions are no longer any more beneficial. The center often refers students to outside professionals after about four to five sessions if necessary and believes plateauing usually occurs after eight to 10 sessions.

We think this policy defeats the purpose of the center in the first place, allowing students to establish an essential rapport with counselors only to sever that relationship and refer students elsewhere. While we understand some patients must be referred to specialists, limiting sessions when Marquette has the means to assist students seems detrimental.

Furthermore, re-evaluating our system could help better diagnose students and work through their  various “college problems.” There is never one method, path or cure for each individual situation, and while the counseling center does recognize this, we can always better equip Marquette’s center to help every student, lessening the amount of referrals necessary and eliminating misdiagnoses or hasty decisions on treatment.

The university should recognize students need the resources provided by the counseling center. But what is currently available falls short of what we believe is actually necessary. Bridging this gap may require better financing and a closer look at specific programming, but those are measures we believe will have long-term value.

Students should realize what a great resource we already have available to us — the center is free, to a point. Only about 10 percent of students utilize the center annually, yet we could all use a little advice and counsel now and then. But we also need to think ahead and work toward improving those services to help students even more so than we already do.