Room 13: A Little Help From Their Friends

Late one night during registration week, a telephone rang in the basement of Stoughton Hall. A co-director of "Room 13"--a counseling, referral and information service run for and by Harvard students--picked up the receiver, only to hear a familiar voice.

She was a chronic caller. As usual, she had a lot to say: descriptions of her problems and fantasies; the ramblings of a lonely person.

Pat M. Booker '75, the co-director, listened to the caller. He asked her questions, listened, then asked more questions. He was willing to listen to all she said because that is Room 13's business. When he finally put down the receiver, he had spent seven hours talking with her.

The caller is not affiliated with Harvard or Radcliffe. Yet she often spends several hours each week talking to an anonymous voice at Room 13. Staff members have referred her to professional help on several occasions, but she still calls back. And Room 13, faced with a scarcity of counselling requests, is loath to discourage any calls, student or non-student.

Room 13 seems to be undergoing a mild, perhaps long-term, identity crisis. It cannot define its purpose beyond that of a service ready to discuss anything at any time with anyone, because if it narrows its mission any further, it may have no business left at all.

Margaret S. McKenna '70 founded Room 13 in 1970, when, as present co-director Marc S. Yoss '76 says, "drugs were a big problem." The drug hot line operated out of Room 13 in Mather House.

Since that time, Room 13 has steadily moved away from dealing with drug problems per se toward a much more generalized counseling service. Thus Room 13 has arrived at its present status as a very generalized counseling, information, and referral service, operating out of the central location of Stoughton basement.

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I asked to sit in at Room 13 on Friday night, the last night of Freshman week. Although warned that there most likely would be no calls that night, I spent two and a half hours there, from 8:30 to 11 p.m.

During that time, a freshman called to find out the location of a German sectioning meeting, another called to ask if the Freshman Union is open during vacations, and another walked in to discuss the relative merits of the Government and History departments. An off-duty staff member called to talk to the two on duty, and a friend of one of the staffers stopped by to talk.

The one counselling call of the night occurred after I left. It was the same chronic caller. One of the students was on duty for the first time; he talked to her until 4 a.m.

***

Despite the broadening of Room 13's services to those of a general information bureau, Yoss is concerned with the lack of callers.

"Our main problem is getting people to think of us," she said. Another staffer sees a certain mood at Harvard as responsible for the lack of interest in Room 13. "A lot of Harvard students are into being independent; they think this place is for a bunch of psychos," Frances V. Bigda '76 said.

Room 13 is annually staffed with 30 student volunteers, who have tried to improve and publicize their services. Seminars with officials from various Boston organizations are held every two weeks, to equip staff members with information on topics ranging from venereal disease to legal aid. One of the student staffers has had special training in rape counseling.

In addition, the office's "Boston Resource" files list information and organizations to which students with specific problems can be referred. Room 13's primary concern now is to involve as many people as possible in its operations, and the staff seems willing to amass a mountain of information to do this.

The staff's concern with publicity problems is reflected in the words of Pat Booker, who co-directs the organization with Marci Yoss: "We're just sort of groping for ways to attract more people. We're making an effort to casualize here."

This effort involves plans to hold open houses and forums with other groups at Harvard. "What's in the mill is inviting areas on campus, say dorms and entries, down to Room 13," Booker said.

The staff also hopes to publish a brochure that would clarify Room 13's purpose for students. At present they are evaluating the University Health Services doctors and psychiatrists, both walk-in and by appointment, so that they can give specific referrals. On one of this fall's holiday weekends, co-director Yoss is planning a staff retreat to formulate more long-term and specific plans for the year.

These plans seem to be an expansion of past efforts at publicity which evidently did not do the trick.

Staffer Bigda explained that calls and visits averaged two per night last year. That average has increased somewhat this year, but it is difficult to determine the average volume of calls at the beginning of the academic year.

Last year's program at Room 13 included three "concentration nights," in which freshmen choosing their majors could talk to representatives from the various departments. A housing meeting with a staff member from the University Housing Office was designed to explain to freshmen applying to Houses exactly what happens to their applications, and the hazards of trying to "beat the computer."

In addition to these meetings, the staff members have knocked on freshman doors, both to talk and to distribute free copies of a paperback entitled The Student Guide to Sex on Campus.

Although many students turned up for several of the open houses, callers have not increased as a result of the publicity provided by these meetings.

The publicity efforts continue at Room 13, but the main bulk of its work still consists of the every night, all-night vigils in the basement of Stoughton Hall. The staff members work in coed pairs, each person spending a night at Room 13 every 12 to 15 days, but never with the same partner. Their job is to answer the two telephone lines and talk with anyone who knocks at their door at the north end of the basement.

When no calls or visitors come in, the on-duty staffers are free to talk to each other, do some reading, or sleep in beds provided for them. When it gets late, they usually go to sleep with the understanding that at any time they may have to get up to deal with a surprise problem or to talk to a lonely voice.

"We are not professionals, and we don't try to be professionals," Bigda said. This sentence is on the lips of every staffer. "We try not to give advice," says co-director Yoss. "Rather, we try to help people decide what the issue is for them, to help sort out things for themselves. After all, they have to face the consequences themselves."

Yoss maintains that there is a definite need for the services of Room 13, "to provide a place where students can talk to other students about anything. Referrals are available and an ear is willing to listen."

The volunteers train themselves to listen well and long. Although only two out of the present 26 student volunteers at Room 13 are psychology majors, all volunteers must enter a training program in order to work there. Each volunteer must be interviewed, undergo a week-long orientation period and participate in weekly "supervision groups" presided over by two counselors from the Bureau of Study Counsel and one from the University Health Services.

In these training groups, which consist of nine or ten students and one advisor, the trainees participate in "role playing," in which one student plays the part of a counselor, one of a counselee. The seven other students look on as the first two act out a hypothetical conference. When their discussion ends, the spectators join the actors for a discussion of how the problem could better have been handled.

The supervisors and students can make suggestions about how to handle cases, but staff members insist that there are no "rights and wrongs" in counseling methods. Staff members insist that they be allowed to use their own personal style in counseling.

Required reading for all Room 13 volunteers is a book entitled On Becoming a Person, by Carl Rogers. The book, first published in 1961, advocates "helping other people talk, helping them to open themselves up" as a method of counselling, said Wendy Enikeieff '76, a staff member. This book stresses the concept of counseling without giving advice, which is emphasized by co-director Yoss.

However, all the staff are not as negative as Yoss when it comes to giving advice from Room 13.

"You must have been talking to Marci," one of them laughs when asked if he avoids giving advice. Some of the staff members say that they find their own experiences useful when counseling, and that they sometimes give advice on the basis of those experiences.

Staff members profess to having found their first counseling calls "scary." But they say this feeling wore off soon, when they realized that the caller at the other end of the line was at least as timid as they. Bill S. Connelly, a staff member, said that people who come in to talk often spend the first ten minutes of their time there apologizing for having troubled the staffer at all.

Throughout the year, Room 13 staffers participate in meetings and seminars on a variety of problems and topics, ranging from the psychology of suicide to the relative merits of various kinds of birth control. Room 13's supervision group program can be taken as a tutorial for credit (Psychology and Social Relations 910r).

The staff is ready and waiting to be confronted with problems, but the waiting is often in vain. Callers wanting movie or bus schedules are frequent, and no calls at all is an even more frequent occurance.

Room 13 receives $2000 annually from the University, half from Dean Whitlock's office and half from the University Health Services. Jane Leavy, assistant to the director of UHS and one of three supervisors at Room 13, said that UHS provides its half of the funds because "a large proportion" of Room 13's calls are health-related. She said that Room 13 acts as an "outreach service" for the Health Services.

The expenditure of these funds is generally the responsibility of the staff of Room 13, although the UHS reviews the large expenditures, Leavy said.

This year, each of Room 13's two co-directors drew a salary of $300 from the funds granted by the University. This amount represents a large decrease from last year's salaries of $700 each for the co-directors. This salary cut was voted by the staff at the end of the last school year.

"No one felt they were necessary," Bigda said. The rest of the staff receives no pay at all for work at Room 13.

A large chunk of Room 13 funds also goes annually toward the purchase of A Student Guide to Sex on Campus, which is distributed free of charge to every freshman room. Other expenses are publicity, refreshments for open houses, and necessities such as lightbulbs for the basement rooms.

Staff members say that the $600 expenditure for The Student Guide to Sex on Campus is a worthwhile expense. They say that there is a specific need for such a book on campus.

"It's the kind of book that people laugh about to their roommates but then read later when they are by themselves," said one staffer. "I would say it's a good book to have around."

The staff members themselves appear to have joined Room 13 for three major reasons. Almost all of those asked cited a desire for meaningful involvement in an effective project, and a desire to work with people. Co-director Pat Booker articulated the third principal reason.

"There is a certain camaraderie that comes from any arbitrary grouping of people," he said. "It's a good group of people," another staff member said.

Different combinations of the desires for involvement, for work with people, and for group friendship characterize the motivating forces of the Room 13 staff.

One staffer said she had no close friends during her freshman year. One day in the spring she and a girl down the hall walked over to Room 13 on the spur of the moment, to see "what went on down there."

Despite the problems that the staff has attracting enough callers to deep them busy, the atmosphere in Stoughton basement appears remarkably warm and easy. The on-duty staffers sit on old furniture placed around a fading brown carpet in the center of the room. When one sits down there with them, talk always seems to flow easily. The real difference between conversations in Stoughton basement and the conversations that probably go on one floor up is the noise level. Voices at Room 13 seem to always be subdued: no loud interjections, but then again no whispers. It is something one picks up from the staffers as soon as one enters the room. They counsel one to make rational, calm decisions; they speak in rational, calm tones.

One could almost say that there, hidden in the basement, away from any outside light, the world becomes reasonable. Inconsistencies vanish; the willingness to solve any problem logically renders all problems solvable. This is a very comforting atmosphere. It seems unfortunate that this room is used more to answer telephone queries about Harvard events than for the help and companionship it is able to offer.

Room 13 cannot define its purpose beyond that of a service ready to discuss anything at any time with anyone, because if it narrows its mission any further, it may havenot purpose left at all.