Advocate Q&A: Natalie Pottschmidt

At Penn State, our Counseling and Psychological Services go above and beyond to ensure Penn Staters have access to whatever they may need as they navigate whatever season they find themselves.

From group therapy to healthy eating tips to spotting signs of varying levels of distress in the student body with their breakthrough Red Folder, they are the Penn State students at the University Park campus and distribute university-wide mental health resources to all Penn State campuses.

Along with working with students, CAPS also gives graduate and doctorate students a chance to get real-world experience helping students. We had the pleasure to talk with Natalie Pottschmidt, a graduate student in her fifth year of the clinical psychology doctorate program at Penn State.

Q: Can you give me an overview of what CAPS does at Penn State?

A: First, I’ll say that my experience is with CAPS at University Park, and I’ll be answering from that lens, but I know that many of the same services and programs are offered through CAPS across the state at the Commonwealth Campuses!

At its core, CAPS works hard to meet the mental health needs of a large, diverse student population and provides multiple levels of care. Students can participate in a wide range of therapy groups to learn specific skills (like stress management, regulating anxiety, self-compassion, and more) or to learn more about themselves and how they interact with others (through interpersonal processes). While there is no limit to the number of groups a student can join in their time at Penn State, they also have the opportunity for short-term individual counseling (usually up to 6 sessions) once or twice during their academic career, where they can target more individualized mental health goals with the 1-on-1 support of a counselor. For many students, coming to CAPS is the first time they’ve sought counseling, and it can open the door for them to continue their care by seeking out other therapy providers. Furthermore, CAPS offers students psychiatric services and case management – essentially a one-stop shop for connecting students to the mental healthcare resources they need, no matter what they’re struggling with!

Additionally, outside of these formal supports, CAPS Chat offers students a chance to meet with a counselor on a drop-in basis to talk through specific questions or concerns that might benefit from some extra guidance. Through outreach with other campus partners, CAPS also helps to host events throughout the academic year to reach students on a broader scale.

All told, CAPS does a lot at Penn State!?

Q: Why is mental health awareness so important for students at this stage of the academic journey?

A: Whether you’re an undergraduate or graduate, traditional age or not, being a student is incredibly challenging! Traditional-age undergraduates entering college soon after graduating high school must navigate not only increased academic rigor but also newly living away from their homes and families. With that increasing independence comes both challenges (e.g., loneliness, uncertainty, self-structuring time) and opportunities (e.g., new experiences, meeting new people, developing a sense of identity) – all of which can be stressful in their own ways! Students entering undergraduate later in life and graduate students may not face those specific developmental concerns, but fitting academic work into the rest of life (relationships, career, hobbies) is no small feat.

On top of the stressful environment they’re in, students may be struggling with any number of mental health concerns, like depression, anxiety, experiences of trauma, alcohol use… to name just a few! Working to address these concerns during college offers students a chance to not only have a healthier, more fulfilling, and successful academic experience but also to build their capacity for navigating psychological problems later in life. Additionally, students are increasingly aware of various mental health conditions through social media, and it can be just as useful to learn about what a psychological disorder isn’t – aka, what’s a normal part of being a human and a student!

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Q: What are some of the biggest challenges confronting mental health professionals on college campuses today? How does Penn State address these challenges?

A: What a huge couple of questions! From my perspective, two of the biggest challenges facing the collegiate mental health field are (1) the increasing demand for services and severity of distress that students present to counseling, often contributing to professional fatigue or burnout, and (2) navigating the continually evolving landscape after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which starkly demonstrated both what’s possible in mental healthcare and what’s needed. For instance, the availability of telehealth services skyrocketed and has remained prevalent across college campuses over the past few years, increasing both access to care and the range of services that counseling centers need to provide. It’s also been clear that disparities in access to resources for students with marginalized identities have been exacerbated by the pandemic, which, again, continues to have a lasting impact beyond “peak COVID.”

While I’ll say more about the Center for Collegiate Mental Health below, one way that PSU works to address these challenges is by better understanding them! The Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) has examined trends in student utilization of counseling center services over time and across centers with different numbers of counselors and models of service provision. Penn State CAPS applies lessons learned in this research by taking care to prevent burnout in their counselors (e.g., limiting the number of clients a counselor can see at a time, partnering with an after-hours crisis provider, protecting time during work hours for professional development), which ensures that they can continue providing top quality care to students.

Additionally, data from CCMH about the negative impacts of COVID-19 across areas of students’ lives provides a basis for advocating for the needs of specific, vulnerable student populations.

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Q: Can you talk about the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State and what it does not only at Penn State but outside of our college community?

A: CCMH is a national research center that is housed at PSU-CAPS and represents a national network of over 800 university and college counseling centers that all have access to the same tools given to clients to gather both relevant demographic/history information and psychological symptoms. Because CCMH is what’s known as a practice-research network (PRN), these same tools are used both in clinical practice (offering clinicians a chance to learn a lot about their client in a shorter period of time and to track symptom change during counseling) and for research (allowing researchers to answer important questions about the state of collegiate mental health and counseling across the entire United States). National mental health findings and other center-specific data analyses are summarized and shared publicly so counseling centers and institutional leaders can better advocate for the mental health needs of specific student populations, as well as resources for the counseling centers.

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Q: What has your experience been as a grad student working in an externship at Penn State?

A: I’m in my fifth year of the clinical psychology doctorate program here at Penn State, and even after these years of training, my experience at the CAPS externship has been invaluable in promoting my growth and development as a clinician. I work at CAPS one day a week, when I see individual clients, co-lead the stress management and sleep clinic group, meet for supervision with both my individual and my group supervisors, and write documentation. On another day, I join a seminar meeting with the other externs, where we discuss topics related to our clinical work, specific client case presentations, or related to professional development more broadly. Throughout, CAPS functions with a high level of organization, and all staff are clearly, strongly committed to providing top-quality training to students. There is a collegial culture among the staff, with a major focus on identifying and working toward each individual’s areas for growth – it’s really wonderful to be a part of!

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Q: Why did you want to enter this field?

A: My path to clinical psychology was a meandering one – when I started as an undergraduate at Notre Dame, I intended to major in biochemistry! Through a couple intro-level classes, I soon grew to love psychology. The dual universality and individuality of the human mind and experience is endlessly fascinating to me. I’m truly honored to get to know each one of my clients and to witness the depth to which they allow themselves to be known! Above all else, I want to help people in our complicated, stressful world – both on the individual level through clinical practice and, hopefully, on a broader scale through research about how psychotherapy can be most effective for individual clients.

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Q: Why did you choose to come to Penn State?

A: As is common in graduate school, I chose Penn State primarily to work with my mentor, Dr. Louis Castonguay, on projects that blur the line between research and clinical work, fostering connections between scientists and clinicians in the unique way that practice-research networks can. The thorough training available through our clinical psychology program was another draw – we not only learn the essential skills for research but also receive training in both psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapies to learn how to be well-rounded clinicians. Additionally, through a close partnership with CCMH, I knew that I’d be able to contribute to research with a national reach, with the data to support a better understanding of collegiate mental health overall and within marginalized student populations who may need additional supports. Finally, while interviewing I heard that the community at Penn State – relationships among students, between students and faculty, and overall on campus – was supportive and friendly, which I have seen confirmed both within my program and during my time at CAPS.