Mumbai: St Xavier’s College, Churchgate, believes in the well-being of its students both physically and mentally. St Xavier’s has a ‘Wellness Centre’ formerly known as the ‘Counselling Centre’ to ensure that the students receive the help they need and feel safe and secure in the college environment. The Wellness Centre is meant to nurture the boundless abilities of Xavierites.
The college motto is "PROVOKING TO FLY". We all know we can be so much more than we are now, but someone has to show us how to unleash our potential.
This is what the Wellness Centre’s purpose is: "HELPING TO FLY".
The Wellness Centre has three major areas in which students are helped.
The Wellness Centre provides services like personal counselling, where problems like depression and anxiety attacks are discussed. Personal counselling works better for the personal and social adjustment of students struggling to adapt to college life. It provides psychometric testing, ie, aptitude tests and personality tests, which are followed by a one-on-one counselling session with the student where parents are requested to be present. These tests give the students clarity and a sense of security.
The Wellness Centre also conducts fun workshops and sessions to reach several students and create awareness. Self-discovery workshops are held to help students discover how much of their actual abilities they are not using, and how to grow into using more of these. Creative training and team-building sessions are some of the sessions the Wellness Centre holds. It also conducts orientation programmes for freshers as adjusting to college life and schedules can be challenging. The Wellness Centre conducts activities that nurture the quality of life and wellness such as student support groups, open music evenings, the culture of giving events, etc.
Soniya Shanbag, a third-year mass communication student spoke to The Free Press Journal about her experience regarding the wellness centre. She said, “In my second year, I recall going through a lot of stress and uncertainty. I struggled to make friends and maintain those friendships; I was going through some issues of my own and could rarely make time for myself. A classmate recommended the Wellness Centre to me as it worked wonders for him. It was free and I could visit it during my college hours, so I was like, why not give it a shot? That’s how I got to know about the Wellness Centre.”
“My experience has been satisfactory. I’m a generally very reserved person, so I don’t get to talk about my problems with anyone—in fact, most of my classmates come to me for advice—so in a way, talking to my counsellor about everything that was bothering me in life felt like a heavyweight getting off my shoulders,” Shanbag added.
“I religiously implement whatever solutions that my counsellor suggests, and looking back, I can say for sure that I have become a better person than I was when I started out. Additionally, the Wellness Centre is very trustworthy- they won’t expose your secrets, no matter how dark they are, to a single soul,” she further added.
