"A psychodynamic couselling intervention for university students seeking psychological help" - Proceedings XXI National Congress Italian Psychological Association, Clinical and Dynamic Section, Milan-27-29 September 2019, SYMPOSIUM SESSION

Introduction: In recent years there has been a rise in the number of university students seeking psychological treatment for their mental health issues that have important implications for academic functioning. Psychodynamic counselling aims at promoting a process of self-reflection, self-discovery and meaning-making, focused on overcoming an ongoing crisis of students and their academic projects. Method: The present study focused on outcomes of psychodynamic counselling providing information regarding an effective short-term treatment in university students needing psychological help at the Counselling Center of Sapienza, University of Rome. This service offers four counselling sessions and a later three-month follow-up session. A total of 105 subjects were involved in the present study. The sample was divided into two groups: students (N=66) who received intervention (Experimental Group) and those (N=39) waiting for intervention (Control Group). Before the first and after the forth clinical session all participants completed the following measures: the WHO Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0 (WHODAS 2.0); the Outcome Questionnaire (OQ-45.2); the Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R) and the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 Brief Form (PID-5-BF). The change following the intervention of psychodynamic counselling was assessed through the multivariate analysis of covariance for evaluating differences between the experimental and control groups on the outcomes’ mean scores. Results: As expected, results showed that some of SCL-90-R, OQ-45 and WHODAS subscales were significantly lower in the experimental group with respect to the control group. Conclusions: Although findings highlighted the usefulness of psychodynamic counselling intervention, they should be considered preliminary because part of an ongoing research and needed to be confirmed.