Amidst Deerfield’s fast-paced, often competitive boarding school environment, the Chen Health Center’s Counseling Office has continued offering drop- in support groups, such as the Managing Anxiety Group and the Grief Support Group.
These are meant to provide drop-in confidential support spaces to interested students through programs such as the five-week Managing Anxiety Group and the monthly Grief Support Group.
During Thursday community times from October 19 to November 16, Counselors Jessica Pierre-Chery and Sarah Rosenthal ran this year’s first five-weeklong round of the Managing Anxiety Group workshops in room 208 of the Chen Health Center. About five students were present at each meeting. A second session is scheduled to start around late January, and a third in the spring.
Counselor Rosenthal and Director of Counseling Jennifer Daily co-run the Grief Support Group, which will be held once every month until the end of the school year. The first session was held on November 13, with about twelve to fifteen people in attendance, and the next meeting will be on December 13 after class.
Regarding the workshop’s group setting, Counselor Daily said, “Research shows that adolescents benefit more from group interventions than they do individual interventions.”
Counselor Rosenthal emphasized the benefits of group counseling, saying, “Students can talk to each other about what they’re going through, and they can give each other ideas and support. People can feel a lot less alone when they’re in a group because they can know that a lot of people are struggling with this.” Counselor Rosenthal described the structure of the Managing Anxiety Group, stating that meetings generally start with relaxation activities or an introduction to stress management tools. The counselors often provide a review of previous sessions for newcomers and then introduce the concept they wish to explore, such as mental and physical relationships with anxiety, supplemented with an activity or discussion. Counselor Rosenthal explained how, at the end of the meeting, the counselors gave students suggestions on integrating new practices into their lives during that week.
Counselor Pierre-Chery said, “We start off with a lot of psychoeducation: explaining what anxiety is and how the nervous system works. “We try to help kids to understand how to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which activates the calming response.”
These strategies included diaphragmatic breathing, guided meditation, and box breathing, which Counselor Pierre-Chery described as “backed by science to activate our calming system,” she said.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, another one of the group’s strategies, aims to manage what Director of Counseling Services Jennifer Daily called “unhelpful, negative and often untrue thinking pattern[s]” such as all-or-nothing thinking or catastrophizing.
Counselor Daily acknowledged how common this thinking is: “Everybody’s got thought distortions about something; you can’t get away from them. But learning to catch them and examine them and challenge them leads to lower anxiety.”
Counselor Pierre-Chery added, “We talk very openly about how we have dealt with anxiety and how we have overcome and how we’re still working through it as well. So everyone in the room is very open about their own personal experiences.”
On the student side of counseling, Head Peer Counselor Xavier Aviles ‘24 mentioned that the two main sources of anxiety he sees are academics and social life, comparing the two to opposite ends of a scale. Focusing too much on anxiety from social life, for instance, could “weigh over that scale and make your academics pile over you at a certain point,” he said, and without balance, “that anxiety just keeps on going back and forth.”
Aviles remarked that the Peer Counseling team often advises students with anxiety to slow down their thought processes and take breaks, especially in the fast- paced environment at Deerfield. “Encouraging mindfulness and breathing exercises can really help a person through their thought processes,” he added.
Regarding habits in daily life, Counselor Pierre-Chery stressed that “adequate sleep is the foundation of good mental health,” in addition to other practices like eating well and exercising. Counselor Daily added that she saw sleep as “the biggest underlying factor” in people visiting the Health Center for anxiety.
Aviles emphasized how the counseling groups express the Deerfield community’s support and said, “Everyone at Deerfield wants you to succeed. No one wants to see you struggling with anxiety or with any of these issues.”