The University of California, San Francisco, recently made a new accommodation available to students with disabilities: “release time” to attend medical appointments.
“Very often that is therapy,” said Tim Montgomery, director of student disability services at UCSF. “But we don’t say therapy; we just say ‘medical appointments’ and leave it at that.”
Like many postsecondary institutions around the country, UCSF is seeing a spike in students registering with disability services to receive accommodations for mental health conditions. At UCSF, which enrolls about 3,200 students in health-related professional and graduate programs, about 14.5 percent of students are registered with disability services, Montgomery said. Nearly 70 percent of those are new to his office.
