Your college years can be among the best years of your life.  They also can be stressful and challenging, both academically and personally. If this happens, you might benefit from additional support, which AACC offers through personal counseling.

Simply defined, counseling is an opportunity to talk over what’s on your mind in a safe and confidential environment. Counselors are professionally trained, objective and unbiased listeners who can help you figure out what might be getting in the way of your feeling successful and happy. They can help you learn new skills and develop different perspectives in looking at situations, so that you will be more capable of solving problems on your own. Counselors often can help you:

• Manage stress, anger and anxiety.
• Improve self-care and wellness.
• Cope with grief, loss and transitions.
• Improve communication and relationship skills.
• Provide new perspectives for self-doubt, self-esteem and self-awareness.
• Identify self-defeating behaviors and thoughts.
• Explore sexual and gender identity concerns.
• Help you manage depression, suicidal thoughts and self-injury.

Services

Counseling Services are free to all registered students at AACC. Sessions last about 50 minutes and a maximum of three visits are available per issue. You will need to make an appointment, but if you leave a message, a counselor will return the call within one business day and arrange a time for an appointment.

Sometimes students are referred to other resources at the college or in the community. This decision is made on a case-by-case basis and determined by a variety of factors including, but not limited to, issues requiring more time to be addressed than the office allows, the expertise of staff addressing the problem and the availability of staff and other resources. Should you be referred to mental health counseling in the community, we will work with you to help navigate the mental health insurance options available to you.

A word about confidentiality

AACC’s counseling staff are master’s-level, Maryland-licensed, clinical counselors legally and ethically required to maintain the confidentiality shared by students with few exceptions. These exceptions include:

• When disclosure is necessary to prevent serious, foreseeable and imminent harm to a student or other identifiable person.
• When there is apparent or suspected indication of physical abuse of a child (either current or past, including disclosure by adults of their own past childhood abuse) or a vulnerable adult.
• When required to disclose confidential information on the basis of a legal requirement.

Please note that on occasion, in order to best serve you, it is possible that more than one representative of the counseling staff will have access to your records. While we do everything we can to preserve your privacy, be aware that there are limitations and risks associated with the use of communication using electronic methods such as email.