A New Way To Get College Students Through A Psychiatric Crisis — And Back To School
Sometimes a psychiatric crisis can be triggered by something small. For Alexia Phillips, 21, it was a heated argument with a close family member in February 2017. She remembers the fight blew up before she left the house to go to classes at Queens College in Flushing, New York.
By midday, Phillips, then a sophomore, says she began to cry loudly and uncontrollably.
"It really triggered me. I just got really angry really fast...I was crying so much I couldn't breathe and couldn't talk. I didn't know how to handle it," she says.
As she would come to understand later, Phillips was experiencing symptoms of her underlying borderline personality disorder, anxiety and depression. But at the time, all she knew was she felt too overwhelmed to go home, or to go to class. She also didn't want anyone to see her like that. Finally, she went to her college counseling center for the first time and asked for help.
Minutes later, Phillips' counselor, a college public safety officer and a paramedic trained to deal with
