Mental-health counselors at La Salle University were feeling overwhelmed, their appointment books packed with students in need of help, seemingly more so than ever.

Counseling director Suzanne Boyll ran numbers last week and confirmed her suspicion. They were busier.

As of Oct. 16, the number of counseling sessions had spiked 48 percent to 204, up from 137 the same time last year, a jump not solely explained by the school's record freshman enrollment.

"There are trauma-related problems, death of a family member, bad news about a class, other family stresses, boyfriend/girlfriend issues, conflict with a roommate," said Boyll, a 30-year veteran and one of four psychologists on staff.

Counseling centers at many schools in the region and nationally note the same trend: more students seeking help for routine and severe problems.

Still shaken from the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, campuses are responding to the demand by adding counselors, reorganizing how they assess students to get to the most acute cases quickly, and training workers to deal with newly emerging problems.

Rutgers University's main campus in New Brunswick, N.J., opened a new $5 million, 35-room counseling center this fall with all mental-health services consolidated there. It also has overhauled how it responds to students.

"If a student calls for help and they need urgent help, they're seen the same day or same moment," said Jill Richards, counseling director.

At Rowan University in Glassboro, an increased number of students are "coming in with heightened symptoms of depression, anxiety, and suicidality, as well as students with developmental disorders, specifically Asperger's disorder, as well as attention-deficit disorder," said David Rubenstein, counseling and psychological director.

Gwynedd-Mercy College in Gwynedd Valley has treated students with deeper problems, too. Counselors in 1999-2000 saw 133 students for 227 sessions; last year, the numbers were 126 students for 610 sessions.

Increasingly, students are requiring hospitalization, some schools say. Temple University last year had 37 students hospitalized, up from 16 in 2007-08.

"We don't know if that's a trend, but we're going to monitor it," said John DiMino, Temple's counseling director.

And more students are coming to campus already with a mental diagnosis.

Nationally, nearly 15 percent of college students in spring 2008 said they had been diagnosed with depression, up from 10 percent in 2000, the American College Health Association says.

A report by Pennsylvania State University's Center for the Study of Collegiate Mental Health found that one in four students who showed up at a sampling of college counseling centers last fall had seriously considered suicide. One-third had previously taken psychiatric drugs.

The influx comes as advances in psychiatric drugs allow more students with serious mental problems to attend college.

Students also find less stigma in seeking help; they routinely see commercials for psychiatric drugs on TV and billboards, experts say.

"These kids want to be in therapy today," said Ian Birky, counseling and psychological director at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, where the number of students seeking individual or group counseling has crept up in the last decade to 841. "They're growing up in a little bit of a different culture."

Add to that the stresses of a bad economy, uncertain environmental conditions, and more "hyper parents" who haven't allowed their children to develop their own coping skills, counselors say.

"If you have a parent who is so hyper-concerned that they 'rescue' them, you don't allow them the time that they need to sort of struggle," said La Salle's Boyll. "They're really cheating their child out of their ability to learn to manage their own stress."