University Psychological Counseling Service

The university counselling service is the place where Connell first puts his worsening depression into words after Rob Hegarty’s suicide. Through an intake questionnaire and a conversation with Yvonne, it makes his distress legible as a serious clinical concern and points him toward treatment; at the same time, the session shows how grief, guilt, social isolation, and the loss of his former life exceed what a short counselling appointment can repair.

Access and First Assessment

Connell learns about the service from Niall, who recommends it on the practical grounds that it is free. The detail matters: Connell has not sought help through a confident plan to recover, but accepts a manageable opening offered by a friend who has noticed enough to direct him toward support. By the time he attends, he is living in scholarship accommodation and seeing little of anyone. The counselling service is an institutional point of contact in a period when his ordinary social connections have narrowed.

In the waiting room, Connell fills out a questionnaire on his lap because the coffee table is too low. His pen pierces the paper on the first question. When the Beck Depression Inventory asks him to rate pessimism, the statement that his future is hopeless and will only get worse feels so recognisable that it seems to have come from inside him. He circles a less severe answer instead, not wanting to alarm the woman who will receive the form. The small tear and the altered response make the assessment scene a study in disclosure already being managed: he has come to be assessed, but still tries to conceal the severity of what he feels.

Yvonne’s Assessment

Yvonne, a middle-aged woman assigned by the university to listen to students’ problems, calls Connell into a small office. They sit opposite one another in low mint-coloured armchairs; behind her is an old computer, and through the window Connell sees a concrete building and a rusting drainpipe. Her questions establish a chronology: Connell says he began feeling bad around January, a few days into the new year, after Rob’s death. Asked whether something happened, he describes a friend from school who died by suicide.

Connell connects his guilt to the distance that had grown between them. He had been away at college, had not kept in touch, and had not replied to Rob’s last message, sent years earlier. When he checks Facebook, he finds the message was an old joke about a woman in a photograph with Connell; he cannot summon a stable mental picture of Rob’s face. Friends later tell him that Rob had been drinking heavily and seemed unlike himself in the weeks before his death, but Connell had not known. The service becomes a setting in which these scattered facts are spoken together: the last unanswered message, the missed signs, and the image of a friend that blurs when Connell tries to hold it still.

Yvonne tells him that Rob’s death was not his fault and that Connell was not responsible for the decisions Rob made. Connell nevertheless returns to the unanswered message and to the thought that other people at least tried to help. His reply sounds more aggressive than he intends. Rather than treating guilt as a problem instantly settled by reassurance, the scene shows its persistence: he understands what Yvonne is saying, but the difference between knowing that he was not responsible and feeling that he failed his friend remains unresolved.

The inventory makes that severity concrete. Yvonne explains that the Beck Depression Inventory assigns scores from zero to three for each item. A person without depression might score between zero and five; a mild episode might produce a score around fifteen or sixteen. Connell’s score is forty-three, which Yvonne describes as indicating very serious depression. He quietly agrees that the result matches his experience. She identifies negative feelings toward himself and suicidal thoughts as concerns to take seriously, then recommends that he speak to a general practitioner at college about possible medication. She is explicit that she cannot prescribe it herself.

Grief and Isolation

The session places Connell’s bereavement within a broader decline rather than treating it as a single isolated feeling. Since Rob’s death, Connell’s previously chronic, low-level anxiety has become severe. Minor interactions such as ordering coffee or answering a question in class can make his hands tingle; he has also experienced panic attacks involving hyperventilation, chest pain, and pins and needles. During an attack, his senses seem to detach from him and the world can appear slowed, artificial, and unreal. These experiences have left him frightened that his capacity to understand the world has come apart, even though the symptoms eventually pass.

His isolation is social as well as emotional. Connell says that Niall is a friend he may be able to talk to, but that Marianne, another close friend from school who is now at Trinity, is away on Erasmus. He speaks with her on Skype almost every night and says she has been supportive; their conversations have not addressed what happened in Italy. He describes her as exceptionally intelligent and as someone who sees the world similarly to him. Yet even this connection is separated by distance, a screen, and a subject left unspoken.

When Yvonne asks whether Connell has made friends in Dublin, he distinguishes between school and university. In Carricklea he sometimes felt isolated, but people liked him and friendships formed because he and Rob belonged to the same group, even without deep agreement in interests or politics. Some of Rob’s behaviour toward girls had alienated him. Connell had hoped that moving to Dublin would bring him among more like-minded people; instead, he says, Trinity students compare how much money their parents make, and he feels less liked than he did at school. His account links his present distress to class-conscious college social life and to the older friendships that have become inaccessible.

The loss is not only that Rob cannot be seen again. Connell says he left Carricklea imagining that he could have a different life, but now hates Dublin and believes he cannot return to the life he left behind. Rob is gone, and the friendships have gone with him. As he speaks, he begins to cry; Yvonne slides a box of tissues patterned with green palm leaves toward him. He apologises, unable to tell whether she has understood him, and the scene keeps the gap between speaking and being understood in view without making his disclosure insignificant.

Treatment, Limits, and Narrative Significance

Yvonne describes counselling as work on Connell’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviours, while acknowledging that it cannot change his circumstances. She gives him worksheets with cartoon arrows and photocopied pages about managing anxiety. Connell pretends he intends to complete and read them, but accepts a note for the college health service recommending attention to his depression and says he will return in two weeks. The practical steps are modest: further assessment, possible medical treatment through a general practitioner, and another counselling appointment. They mark a beginning, not a resolution.

The service’s importance lies partly in this bounded function. It offers Connell a listener, a name for the seriousness of his condition, and a route beyond the room, but it cannot return Rob, restore the old group of friends, or make Dublin feel like the alternative life Connell had hoped to find. That limit is stated directly in Yvonne’s distinction between changing a person’s response and changing their circumstances. The session makes help available without pretending that institutional care can undo bereavement.

The account also places the counselling encounter beside the continuing public life of Rob’s death. At the funeral, people describe Rob as lively and devoted to his family; Marianne, recalling his bullying, sees the cruelty and insecurity that those tributes cannot contain. Afterward, school friends leave messages on his Facebook page, gestures Marianne initially finds pointless and later understands as part of grief in a world where little makes sense. The service does not provide a final interpretation of Rob or settle what his friends might have done. Instead, it gives Connell a place to voice the questions and guilt that remain, while the wider narrative shows grief returning through memories, digital traces, and the damaged friendships left behind.