This paper examines the previous studies about international students’ help-seeking. International students experience more stress than local students, and they are more vulnerable to mental health problems. It is important for international students to seek help before problems get worse, but their underutilization of university mental health support services has been reported in previous research. This paper reviewed 25 studies to clarify the existing findings and current problems within this topic in hopes of providing a direction for future research to better support international students. These previous studies tend to categorize international students by regions and countries, which limits the findings to certain groups of international students. Therefore, a paradigm shift that examines international students’ help-seeking more systematically is required. Additionally, a model that considers the impact of their home country’s culture, the impact of the host culture, and the possibility of changes, is necessary. Further research that addresses international students in Japan is required in order to better apply support practices for international student in Japan.

We analyzed changes in the major needs of students who visited a university student counseling center for the first time during the period 2017-2019 (pre-COVID-19) and in 2020 (post-COVID-19), using KH coder. Coding rules were created from the co-occurrence network of frequent words, and 19 codes were applied to the data before and after the period to draw co-occurrence networks where the Jaccard coefficient was larger than 0.1.Compared to before the period, the major needs changed from “research” to “emotional distress” after the period. The primary reason for the change seemed to be a change in the application procedure before and after the period, but it is also possible that the college students’ concerns changed qualitatively during the COVID-19. Student counseling should make suggestions for visits and interventions based on these changes in major needs.

In this study, we developed the “CCAPS Internet-based Quick Assessment System” using the Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms Japanese version (CCAPS-Japanese), which has been established as reliable and valid. This system allows students to answer questions about their mental health via the web. It is unique as it provides immediate feedback to the students and creates a profile report, which allows them to check their results. This will help students better understand their mental health status, and lead them to request assistance, if necessary. It will also help counselors detect students in need of assistance at an early stage, build a support system, and visualize the effects of counseling. Demonstrations of the system’s functioning during annual health check-ups and student counseling confirmed its reliability and practicality. By adopting this system in multiple higher education facilities, a large-scale database can be created, which will contribute to understanding the actual status of students’ mental health and formulating future action plans.

This article reviews the research papers concerning student counseling published in Japan in the academic year, 2021. Forty­one papers were organized according to the table of contents of the “Handbook of Student Counseling” into the following five categories: (1) theoretical studies, (2) counseling and support, (3) collaboration and cooperation, (4) activities within the university community, and (5) support for student counseling. As a result, we found that the following were cited as recent developments: (1) studies on the implementation of distance counseling at student counseling institutions and studies on the psychological and mental health of university students during the Covid­19 pandemic are beginning to be reported, (2) studies on support for stu­ dents with diverse characteristics and difficulties, such as surveys on counseling systems for international students and consultation cases of students with various symptoms, are being conducted, and (3) an increase in literature reviews and practical reports on several student support activities that go beyond individual counseling, such as group activities and peer support. Based on these findings, future research issues are discussed.