>> I'm Mark Pettishenauk [assumed spelling] and I'm a licensed psychologist and the director
of student counseling and psychological services at Augusta University in Georgia.
It's really a career in which you learn about other people and you learn about what matters
to them, what's not going well in their life and you use your training and expertise and research
to enter into their life and through therapy and to help transform them and their path forward
so that they're in a place where their life is more worth living.
Where they're not struggling, where they're really ultimately becoming the person they're
meant to be and to try to figure out what's preventing them from doing that.
You know, what it means to be a psychologist in that setting is that you need
to a very strong general practitioner.
You need to be able to be very comfortable with diagnosing, assessing,
treating and really developing relationships with any type of issue and any type of person
and from all walks of lives, international students, from simple adjustment disorders
and anxiety up to pretty severe debilitating mental illness.
And you need to be able to do that pretty fluidly throughout the day
in which you might have group therapy, couple's therapy, individual therapy with varying degrees
and severity and acuity of concerns and then go do an outreach presentation,
go do some prevention work and then a crisis might walk in the door.
The most common things students come in and work with and address are depression,
anxiety and relationship concerns.
Depression and anxiety are each kind of umbrella categories.
I mean, there are probably dozens of specific disorders within depression and within anxiety.
So, as the director I'm really -- I'm really the liaison and main contact.
If anything mental health related to any student at any given time.
So, a lot of times I will get, you know, contacts from various dean's offices
or faculty members about how do we manage this particular student.
Maybe they're engaging in some -- they've had a conduct violation, they've done something
that technically is a behavior issue, but they also kind of know
that this person has a mental health disability and they're thinking, well,
can I -- you know, how do I handle that?
Do I have the right to give this person a sanction or am I going
to be discriminating against them.
So, in that way I'm kind of a mental health consultant at large
for the university any time it relates to a student.
So, any given day I don't know what I'm going to get.
It keeps things exciting.