About

The Counselling and Personal Development Service is a professional, confidential and free service, which is available to all registered undergraduate and postgraduate DCU students.

The service provides one-to-one counselling and specialist input on a wide range of personal academic, family, social, psychological and mental health issues that hinder a student's academic performance in a non-judgmental and open manner.  This includes support and help at a time of immediate crisis.

The service also provides a range of on-line wellbeing, resilience and mental health advice and information including bibliotherapy which is quality self-help reading for psychological health.  In addition the service offers a mindfulness, wellbeing and stress reduction lunchtime series and a student empowerment and life skills programme (bereavement facilitated student forums; online cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety;  stress, anxiety and low mood workshops).

The Counselling and Personal Development Service Team

The Counselling and Personal Development Service is staffed by four full-time and sessional (qualified, accredited and experienced) counselling psychologists/psychotherapists both on and off site. We have some psychotherapists who are at an advanced stage in their psychotherapy training/accreditation process.  We have two administrators to the service onsite.

Mission Statement

The DCU Counselling Service is committed to the provision of professional student counselling to address personal and social issues that hinder academic performance, to enable wellness, to enhance personal development and your student experience.

The service aims to enable you the student to maximise your potential, to grow in self awareness and to develop effective life skills. It supports you in facing challenging situations and in so doing finding possible inner and outer resources to make more informed and wiser choices during your time in DCU.

The underlying values which guide our work are as follows:

Student-focused, Integrity, Respect, Competence, Caring, Responsible, Ethical, Professional.

We aim to foster an environment that promotes diversity, equality, inclusion, deep learning, creativity and development at both the individual and collective levels.

We place a strong emphasis on the lived student experience, supporting student engagement, personal development, talent enhancement and transformation.