“There should be a central office that’s looking at it not only from a clinical point of view, but what’s the academic and social impact, and how do we deal with residential, security and confidentiality issues,” Jenkins says.

That’s analogous to the mission outlined for the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (OSAPR) when it was formed last spring.

The Committee to Address Sexual Assault at Harvard, headed by Professor of International Health Jennifer Leaning ’68, recommended that a centralized office be created to provide 24-hour support for victims and to coordinate campus resources for the prevention of sexual assault.

Leaning is also a member of the committee currently examining mental health on campus.

The OSAPR has also created a website that includes a comprehensive list of all services where a sexual assault victim could find help.

Although the bureau’s website does include a section on UHS, the UHS mental health services website does not mention the Bureau of Study Counsel at all.

There exists no single page online—save a PDF file of a pamphlet buried on the Provost’s website—that lists all the services a student could utilize for mental health care.

Hyman says a central office might not be the right answer, but that the task force will consider it as a possibility.

Ducey says that he thinks a central office is impractical.

“If there were one centralized office, it would be very hard for them to know all the mental health providers,” Ducey says.

Hyman and Gross both say that one way to better direct students to mental health resources is to improve education for House tutors and senior tutors, so that they can help guide students into the right care.

File Sharing

The decentralization of Harvard’s mental health services makes it doubly important that individual clinicians from the bureau and UHS communicate with each other.

The University Mental Health Coordinating Board was created as a result of the 1999 provost’s report to bring together representatives of the two care providers to communicate with each other and to update Hyman about mental health services.

And last year, UHS and the bureau implemented of a “coordination of care” system to allow clinicians at the bureau and UHS who see the same student to communicate with each other about the student’s treatment.