This study aims to clarify the features of factors in professional help-seeking behavior of college students by comparing them with adults. Logistic regression was used to examine the relationship between professional help-seeking behavior and professional help-seeking attitudes as predictors, including the two factors of professional help-seeking and self-help orientation, as well as awareness of psychological difficulties and negative perception of one’s own psychological difficulties. Both group’s help-seeking behavior was predicted by their awareness of difficulties and professional help-seeking. Contrary to adult, the self-help orientation of college students was negatively correlated with help-seeking. There were also significant correlations between the awareness of difficulties, self-help orientation and negative perception of psychological difficulties, indicating that college student would be more likely to have conflicts about help-seeking behavior. Significant corrlations were found between adults’ awareness of difficulty and help-seeking and self-help orientation. The simple slope analysis suggested that when combined with high psychological distress, high professional help-seeking and self-help orientation of adults have moderating effects on the help-seeking behavior. Using these results, we discussed effective approaches for college students.

The purpose of this study was to identify the underlying issues in crisis response by listening to actual practitioners in university counseling, focusing on its organizational aspects. A focus group of seven participants (6 head counselors and 1 former director of a university counseling center) was formed and the discussions were qualitatively analyzed. Issues in crisis response were categorized as (1) “lack of common principles” including lack of underlying philosophy and guiding principles, (2) “inconsistent understanding of responsibility” for legal and ethical responsibilities, (3) “ineffective division of roles” in defining the function of student counseling and division of roles among departments, and (4) “inadequate safety measures” in counseling centers and university- wide support systems. These issues were found to interact with each other and be influenced by the “context of diversity” in terms of crisis incidents, student needs, and environmental factors. Based on the findings, directions for addressing these issues including the use of a legal perspective to develop common principles, the possibility of forming a university-wide crisis response team, and the use of an ethical decision-making model were discussed.

This article outlines trends in the student counseling field in the 2024 academic year, focusing on the Japan Student Counseling Association and national meetings related to student counseling, and discusses future prospects. The year 2024 was characterized by an increase in both the number of regular members joining and leaving the association, indicating a greater mobility, while the number of institutional members was stable and increasing. In terms of training themes, the most notable features were the almost complete absence of training themes related to the new coronavirus and several training themes that questioned the very nature of student counseling itself, i.e., what is student counseling?
Looking to the future, as the scope of support for student counseling expands, as support methods diversify from individual face-to-face counseling to remote counseling and outreach support, and as the employment pat- terns of counselors and student support organizations change, it is expected that rethinking student counseling will continue to take place at the academic, organizational, and individual counselor levels. In this context, it is expected that the rethinking of student counseling will continue to take place at the academic, organizational, and individual counselor levels. In addition, the theme of generation-to-generation inheritance in the student counseling field will continue to be important in the future. Accordingly we also discussed points to keep in mind in the generation-to-generation inheritance.