In this teaching commentary, we describe a re-positioning of office hours from private faculty offices to public spaces such as student centers and cafes. We argue that this shift promotes faculty-student interaction, lowers barriers to help-seeking behavior, and facilitates collaboration among students. We highlight the power dynamics of private…

David Adeyemo works at the Department of Guidance and Counselling at the University of Ibadan in Ibadan, Nigeria. This article presents a transcript of an online interview with Adeyemo, focusing on his experience providing counseling services at the University. Topics in the interview include the percentage of campus students that come for…

This article presents an online interview about college psychotherapy at a Hong Kong counseling center. The interview discusses how students generally feel about going for counseling or therapy and how common it is in Hong Kong.

The editors of this special section have focused on a theme that is both old and new. Research on help seeking has a long history and a strong theory pointing out that help seeking is an important academic strategy of self-regulation that facilitates learning. It is a new topic to consider in the context of broadened learning environments,…

Romer and Walker's "Appreciative Inquiry," which obtained input from 16 capable personal assistants, challenges some influential assumptions about personal assistance and opens a way to think about the demanding work of developing capable and committed personal assistants. Attempts to depersonalize the relationship between people…

Contributions to this special section represent advances in understanding help seeking as a self-regulated learning strategy that occurs in classrooms, during computer-mediated communications, and when using intelligent systems that provide help to improve learners' help-seeking skills and knowledge acquisition. Collectively, the research and…

This article introduces Yii-nii Lin, Professor in the Center for Teacher Education at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, and prior director of the university's counseling center for a 3 year term. She has worked as a university counselling psychologist for more than 15 years when she participated in an online interview that questioned…

This reaction article comments on the major contribution titled "Motivation and Autonomy in Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Behavior Change: A Look at Theory and Practice." It first points out the article's strengths, the primary of which was to move the construct of motivation to the center of focus in the discussion of counseling. In addition,…

While students are the center of the college admission process, the individual student is transient within the process, involved for a short amount of time, trying to get a spot in the freshman class of a university. Counselors and admission officers are the stewards of the process, the keepers of the code and the architects of the maze. In this…

Comments on previous articles (this issue) by Solberg et al., Tata and Leong, and Lin on help-seeking behaviors of Asian Americans. Sees articles as dispelling false images and stereotypes about mental health needs of Asian Americans. Suggests that future research focus on diversity of Asian American population and development of theories and…

This reaction article extends the research and practice recommendations for online counseling from the Major Contribution to the November 2005 issue of "The Counseling Psychologist" by prioritizing research and practice in online psychoeducation, self-help, and mutual help. Research suggests that tens of millions of Americans use the Internet for…

Arguing that seeking help when needed is an integral part of the learning process, this paper describes a three-stage help-seeking process; examines computer conferencing in academic contexts; and describes several characteristics that promote help-seeking, including the admission of inadequacy, the decision to seek help, and the ultimate…

Dr. Deanna Pledge is a licensed psychologist and professional counselor. She has worked in public and private settings for over a decade. She has been working with teens, children, and adults around abuse issues for the past ten years, and has written "When Something Feels Wrong: A Survival Guide About Abuse." In this interview she answers a…

In spite of the development of medical services in Asian countries, mental illness and mental health services remain a stigma. An awareness of the causes and consequences of mental illness is also lacking. Since the 1990s, much work has been done in Malaysia to advance the people's concepts about the scientific approach to mental illness and to…

A study of 71 individuals with specific learning disabilities and moderate to high vocational success revealed commonalities in the ways they were able to achieve, including a strong desire for success, goal orientation, ability to interpret the disability experience, persistence, selection of an appropriate work environment, learned creativity,…