University Counseling Center at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University

The University Counseling Center at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University is one of the centers of Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, located in Dammam, in the Eastern Province of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It offers academic, educational, psychological, social, and cultural counseling services via the colleges' counseling services units. Services cover the university's staff, their families, and community members.

The center seeks to offer comprehensive services to all university students, faculty members, staff, and members of the surrounding community. These services aim to develop their abilities and learning skills. The center aspires to assume a preventive role in assisting students in determining and learning the skills that would help them to efficiently achieve learning and life-related objectives. It also seeks to support and enhance the students' health growth and development. This is achieved by providing students with advisory services, raising the university community awareness, fostering a safe environment for students, and assuming a role that would contribute to instilling such an environment.

The University Counseling Center offers clinical services to all university students, faculty members, and staff. These services encompass individual and psychological counseling. They cover anxiety, depression, stress, conflicts, loss, grief, marital problems, smoking, addiction, and life decisions.

The center offers individual counseling services to students suffering from academic problems. These services seek to help them cope with exam stress, educational pressure, learning difficulties, and learning strategies. They help them develop study skills and learn time management and teamwork skills. It also offers professional counseling services upon applying professional tendency criteria that help students determine their career orientations and by discussing their interests related to the current and prospective professional orientation programs. The center also collaborates with the Alumni and Career Development Center.

The University Counseling Center offers group counseling services to groups ranging between two and eight members who share similar interests to support their emotional, behavioral, psychological, and social development and growth. This is achieved by holding psychological and educational sessions, forming formal groups and focus groups, and conducting the psychological assessment of the students' abilities and traits in light of psychometrically efficient electronic tests standardized pursuant to the environment of Saudi Arabia. These assessments enable students to review their results immediately after completing the assessment. In this respect, the clinical psychologist would offer a session to discuss the assessment findings, ultimately enabling students to understand such results.

Awareness services offered by the University Counseling Center cover twenty-three counseling service units in the colleges. They are available between the University headquarters and its affiliated premises. These services encompass means for raising awareness, including emails, newsletters, brochures, posters, and display screens available throughout the university campus. Services also include a crisis intervention plan, which is applied in favor of students suffering from severe emotional stress that could potentially threaten their lives. These services are provided by a qualified team that can handle emergencies, such as suicide attempts, suicide threats, physical abuse, violence, self-harm, and trauma, among other crises.