Contact us M-F, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm by phone at 207-786-6200 or email us at CAPS@bates.edu to schedule an appointment. Include dates and times you are available in the coming week if sending an email.

We see the vast majority of students in the same week you contact us depending on your availability.

Bates students use Same-Day appointments to meet with a counselor to address a specific concern or need that they feel is urgent and needs to be addressed quickly.  This stream-lined scheduling allows for rapid response in scheduling appointments to address student’s concerns with greater immediacy.

CAPS is closed during winter and summer breaks.  Our clinicians can help you identify possible providers in the areas you’ll be during the breaks if needed.

We do not have formal session limits. We do work with each student to come up with a treatment plan that best meets that student’s needs if they can be met within the available resources at Bates. Some students will benefit from a one-time consultation while others might benefit from intermittent short-term counseling or referred to a confidential therapy group.

Most clinicians in CAPS are integrative and eclectic which means they blend a variety of styles into their clinical treatment approach. All of us incorporate relational, social justice, trauma-informed, empirically supported, and culturally sensitive lenses into our work and recognize that a collaborative and trusting relationship is the heart of clinical work.

There are many different things people mean when they say “long term therapy.” Some common examples are one year of consistent weekly care for a defined problem, several years of once-a-month care for a chronic condition, episodic care where someone comes in for a few weeks or months over years with breaks in between, or biweekly sessions to check in and stay accountable on something, among many others. Given the high demand for services at Bates, students interested in weekly therapy sessions throughout the school year may benefit from a referral to an off-campus provider.

In most cases students connect with their counselor, but sometimes it’s just not a match. If that’s the case, we suggest talking through whatever the situation is with the counselor to see if it can be resolved. There are times when discussing just this sort of thought might open a new therapeutic dimension. You can ask our front office to schedule you with someone else when you make a future appointment. 

The short answer is that “we do.”

The longer answer is “within the context of the academic semester and year.”

Bates, like most colleges nationwide, can evaluate, recommend, manage and stabilize students on certain medications. Once stabilized, students can be followed by either a local prescriber in our area, telehealth providers licensed in Maine, or even by their Primary Care Physician back home.

This offers students support to initially manage their symptoms, while also planning for longer term continuity of care, especially over breaks and the summer. From an equity perspective, this approach also ensures other students have opportunities to access the psychiatric care they need as well to be successful at Bates.

We do NOT see students only to manage stimulant medications. Students being seen by external therapists are encouraged to request psychiatric referrals from their therapists directly and/or to utilize their existing network through their health insurance.

In 2024-25, CAPS saw 30.4% of the student body compared to similarly sized schools (<2500 students) who saw 18.6% of their student body. Bates average number of sessions was 7 sessions per student compared to 6 sessions at these other schools. 45% of Bates students were seen for < 3 Sessions, 59% were seen for <5 Sessions, and 80% of our students were seen for <10 Sessions.

Data from Association for University and College Counseling Directors, Annual Survey, 2025, reporting period June 1, 2024 – July 30, 2025.

The short answer is “yes.”

While CAPS offers an array of mental health services to the Bates student body, there are times when a student’s needs extend beyond the scope of services CAPS can provide. Practicing ethically requires CAPS to be clear about what we can and cannot provide and to refer students whose needs are outside our scope of practice. CAPS reserves the right to refer in the following situations while recognizing this is not a complete or comprehensive list of all the situations that would indicate a referral is appropriate:

• Students who require more than once weekly individual therapy for an extended period of time.
• Students who have had extensive treatment in the past and need/expect extensive long-term additional treatment.
• Students who require excessive utilization of crisis intervention.
• Students who present a chronic, ongoing risk of harm to self or others, and whose symptoms do not respond to outpatient intervention or require specialized services.  This includes students with a history of multiple hospitalizations, chronic suicidality, homicidality, and/or a history of repeated suicide attempts.
• Students presenting with a concern or disorder, that requires expertise or resources, not sufficiently available at CAPS.  Examples may include, but not limited to, mandated or court-ordered assessment and treatment, forensic assessments, and extensive treatment for eating disorders.
• Students who are unable to maintain prolonged periods without treatment (i.e. academic breaks).
• Students who are non-compliant with treatment, as defined by excessive no-shows, repeated stops and starts to counseling, and/or repeated requests to change providers.
• Students who demonstrate harassing, menacing, threatening, or violent threats or behaviors toward a member of the CAPS team.
• Due to mental health professional licensing restrictions, CAPS clinicians are not able to offer therapy sessions to Bates students outside the state of Maine.

Students need to schedule their own appointments at CAPS.

If you want to assist them in making an appointment, you can call from your phone and after we pick up, you can hand it to them or put them on speaker phone to schedule it. You can also send CAPS an email and include the other person on the email. It might say something like:

Hi CAPS, I’m writing to introduce my friend/child/student, who I’ve included on this email. I hope you will follow up with my friend/child/student on a separate and private email so they can discuss possible use of CAPS services.

CAPS does not make cold calls to students. We encourage you to share your concerns with the student directly if you can.

We recognize that some situations exist where reaching out for help from CAPS is stigmatized. We trust students to decide when, where, and how to make use of our services. CAPS services are confidential and we do not confirm or deny whether a student is seen at our office unless the student has given legal consent for us to do so.

CAPS makes outreach to any student who uses the Protocall Crisis Counselor to invite the student to take advantage of CAPS services if they wish to do so.

The Bates Care Collaborative is an on-campus resource that anyone can refer a student to when you think the student could benefit from additional support.

In cases where you believe a student may be having a mental health emergency, you should call Campus Safety at 207-786-6111 and ask them to do a wellness check.

We will always consult with students, staff, faculty, or parents, we will focus on your feelings and experience in that consult. We would like to support you through the stress of the concern you are experiencing.

While you might share information about a student, we will only act on it when it involves potential concerns of safety to self or others. In those cases, we may be ethically and legally required to contact Res Life, Student Affairs or Campus Safety to assess the situation to determine next steps.

We strongly suggest you share your concerns for a student with them and encourage them to seek professional help if they are open to it. Since these are case-by-case situations, we cannot assure concerning information you share about someone else will remain confidential.

CAPS does not provide competency evaluations for any of these things.

We also regularly say that it is not advisable to restrict students from activities because of a mental health condition or symptoms, especially if that condition is not directly and objectively impacting their performance in that activity to a level that would warrant any other student without a mental health condition from being refused participation. 

CAPS does not offer assessments for ADHD or learning disabilities.  We can try to help you find providers in the area that do, or you can contact the Office of Accessible Education for referrals as well.

We always want to hear about ideas, concerns or suggestions for our office. We want to hear when we didn’t get it right, if we did get it right, or if you simply have ideas or suggestions. In all of these cases, write to us at CAPS@bates.edu, and someone, usually our Director, will respond.