Objectives: To investigate the effectiveness of Objectives: To investigate the effectiveness of counseling at a university mental health
center, therefore providing practice-based evidence in China. Methods: The data of this study were
collected from a research database that was established ten years ago regarding counseling processoutcome
in a university mental health center. One hundred and three university students who
participated in this study were reduced to a sample of 63 clients (mean age = 21.75, SD = 2.28;
female 79.4%; average number of session = 7.05, SD = 3.53) after removing some data that couldn’t
be used to calculate pre-post outcomes due to missing data or ending too early (i.e. terminating
counseling after just one or two sessions). A clinical sample of 31 clients (average number of
session = 7.45, SD = 3.71) was generated according to the clinical cut-off score (a score of 63) on the
Chinese version of Outcome Questionnaire-45.2 (OQ-45.2). The effect size and the clinically significant
change status of the samples were benchmarked against that of two clinical samples from two American
university counseling centers. Results: (1) This university mental health center obtained a medium prepost
effect size (d =.57) based on the total sample and a large pre-post effect size (d = 1.22) based on the
clinical sample, which was larger than that of the available clinical sample from an American university
counseling center; (2) According to the clinically significant change status, 14 clients (22.2%) recovered,
9 clients (14.3%) improved, 36 clients (57.1%) didn’t change and 4 clients (6.3%) deteriorated, which
was similar to the available general sample from another American university counseling center with a
non-significant difference. However, the rates of recovery of the two samples differed significantly (p<
.05) when these two samples were divided into the recovered and the unrecovered group. Conclusion:
Counseling delivered at this university mental health center seemed to be effective which was not worse
than two American samples and even better in some aspects, which should be considered cautiously due
to the data limitation.