As state government grapples in the next few months with the budget for the University of Wisconsin System, we hope that mental health counseling is not forgotten in a process which will almost certainly produce monetary pain for all arms of the state.

Along with the voluminous two-year budget, the system's regents received a report last week about the demand for counseling at UW campuses. It discusses not only demand but what steps the system could take to limit the services. Limitations of course proceed from a desire to limit costs, but the idea is counterproductive.

Demand for counseling has been growing for years, even before the importance of student mental health was underlined by shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. National surveys done at the beginning of the decade found almost half of students saying they were so depressed they could barely function, and not quite 10 percent had seriously considered suicide.

There is an increase, experts say, because of increased attention to mental health, encouragement to seek treatment, and a reduced stigma for those who do. Within the UW System's four-year campuses, the percentage of students receiving counseling services ranges from a high of 9 percent in Madison to a low of 3.2 percent in Milwaukee. Our own UW-Parkside could not provide information for that calculation, but on average, 4.7 percent of each student body receives help.

Couple the expected increases with a student population containing some troubled veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the university system is looking at a probable increase in demand for counseling.

Charging for missed appointments, using counselor interns and more group therapy, and outsourcing some counseling - all recommendations with the report - are good ideas. Limiting visits isn't. Some campuses have those but don't enforce them now for various reasons, at times because there is no other service available.

Third-party billing has not been pursued in many cases, the UW report says, because it requires meeting insurance company and state standards, and students covered by parental insurance may not want their counseling needs known. But before it considers measures to limit service, the system should look at options such as third-party billing, or increased fees, or cutting administrator travel, and so on.

There is a tendency to question the counseling, a tendency to say that we grew up OK, so what's wrong with them? That does not admit or address the real damage which people suffer or which we have suffered and which still affects our lives, nor does reduce someone's very real pain when we have the ability to do so. If that isn't enough incentive to help, we should realize that a few dollars of prevention may save the much greater costs to investigate the next campus shooting and deal with the mental damage to survivors.