Counselling Centre

Mental health refers to overall psychological well-being. It includes the way one feels about oneself, the quality of relationships, and the ability to manage feelings and deal with difficulties. Good mental health isn’t just the absence of mental health problems, i.e. Not feeling bad is not the same as feeling good.

It’s easy to know when a child has a fever. A child’s mental health problem may be harder to identify. Excessive anger, fear, sadness or anxiety , academic failure can be just the manifesting symptoms with a larger issue at its base. Mental health problems can disrupt daily life at home, at school or in the community.

Hence as a team of mental health professionals and volunteers at ASMITA, we are working towards improving the emotional wellbeing and mental health of children and young people enabling them to develop to the best of their capabilities.

The Counselling Center is committed to providing a broad range of high quality, innovative, and ethical services that address the psychological, educational, social, and developmental needs of students.

We believe …everyone’s life is work in progress as failure means —Success is taking just some more time to be reached

What is a learning disability?

Students with learning disabilities have near or above average intelligence; but have difficulties with one or more in reading, writing, arithmetic, and written language.

The child is smart enough to get ‘A’s but can only earn ‘C’s or ‘ D’s, no matter how hard he works. He is not retarded but simply has trouble learning.

It is like a very fast sports car that gets bogged down in heavy traffic or road construction. Even though the car has the “ability” to go very fast, it can’t “achieve” a very high speed.

With a learning disability, it is information that gets bogged down while traveling through brain.

Why diagnose Learning Disabled students early?

• Failure to identify a learning disability at an early age and consequently to delay the provision of intensive, individualized remedial instruction results in academic failure.  A well adjusted and intelligent child at five or six years, if not diagnosed, gets  emotionally disturbed with repeated failures. Anxiety and depression would be likely experiences for such a child from the age of nine or ten.
• As the child enters primary school, the focus is more on content information than on basic skills .He or she is expected to write essays, read fluently, copy notes from the chalkboard and answer questions from the passages. Approaches used in standard one cannot be used when the child is older as it is time consuming to teach basic phonetics or grammer. Hence the earlier the better to zcatch them young.
• Last and the most important –

            • 80% of students with a learning disability have trouble reading.

            • 90% of students will read normally if they receive help in the first grade.

            • 75% of children who receive help after the age of nine will have some difficulty throughout life…

What is special education?

Special education is the education of students with special needs in a way that addresses the students’ individual differences and individual needs. It aims at helping children to deal with difficulties in language, mathematics, comprehension, reading skills. Study skills and individualized education planned through special educators help in improving the academic performance of the child.

ASMITA’s mission

ASMITA’s mission for setting up the Counselling Center: improving the emotional wellbeing and mental health of children and young people to enable them to develop to the best of their capabilities.

Objectives

• To help students understand themselves, set goals and move towards a better tomorrow.
• To identify and assess special children and mainstream them.
• To help students understand the relevance of schooling in relation to the world of careers and work through career awareness programmes.
• To help students to develop their emotional and social intelligence.
• To create awareness about child development and parenting techniques in parents.
• To assist teachers in student development.

Our services

1. Parent workshops – In this complex world, it takes more than a good school and good home to educate children. It entails these two educational institutions working together. Research has shown that children whose parents are involved in their formal education tend to do better in school. Hence we team up with parents to have interactive workshops which aim at enlightening parents about the students’ developmental concerns and empowering parents with skills to effectively deal with their precious ones…

2. Teachers’ training & workshops – It is generally acknowledged that promoting teaching quality is a key element in improving primary and secondary education. One of the primary goals of the center is to have – No Child Left Behind. This makes it imperative to have a “highly qualified teacher” in every classroom. The center is aiming at catering to this developmental need in as an innovative way as possible.

3. Counselling and Psychotherapy – Counselling is an interpersonal relationship aimed at reducing psychological discomfort and increasing the client’s sense of well being. The counsellor helps the client to explore his thoughts, emotions, behavior, set goals and paves a way for a positive change in his life.

4. Psychological testing and Assessment – Assessment tests help in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of personality, intellectual abilities, aptitudes, interests and emotional wellbeing. These tests help in screening for learning disabilities, emotional disturbances and intellectual deficits.

5. Career Guidance and counselling – Career is not just a job or a profession but a lifestyle .The career guidance programme at our center aims at helping students understand themselves through standardized psychological tests and develop a career plan for their lives. The counsellor lists a range of career options that the student can choose from, based on his aptitude, interests and personality.

6. Special education and remedial services – ‘Special Needs Children’ are those who cannot benefit maximally from the regular classroom teaching-learning experiences on account of physical, mental, emotional disabilities, which may or may not be easily identified. These children need special attention in the classroom and special education outside the classroom. Since children with special needs come from different family backgrounds and mixup freely with the other children with/without disability, some of them may pass through the school system without being identified but definitely being a problem to themselves and the society. Hence we believe it is important to “look for skills and not skill deficits”.

We have a team of qualified special educators and psychologists who identify, screen and take remedial sessions for children with learning problems. The student teacher ratio is 1:5 and each child is helped based on his / her individual learning requirements, strengths and learning styles.