Help When Needed: Faculty & Staff Assistance Office
Free, confidential counseling for navigating work and life issues
Karen Brouhard (left) and Bonnie Teitleman, both licensed clinical social workers, are counselors at the Faculty & Staff Assistance Office. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi
This is the first in a series about Boston University services available to faculty and staff to help with work-related and personal issues.
BU’s Faculty & Staff Assistance Office (FSAO) provides a quiet, reassuring environment where employees can talk about issues affecting their professional or personal lives. For three decades, the office in the basement of the School of Social Work building on Bay State Road—staffed by licensed clinical social workers—has offered counseling, resources, and referrals to those seeking help with addiction, domestic violence, mental health, relationship, and parenting issues, and managing a work-life balance. Services are free and completely confidential.
“We are experienced behavioral health providers who know and understand the culture here at Boston University,” says Bonnie Teitleman (SSW’83), director of FSAO. “We offer a compassionate, caring environment.”
With locations on both the Charles River and Medical Campuses, the FSAO is available to all full- and part-time employees and their families, providing what’s called a brief treatment model, where people can be seen for up to six sessions. During the initial visit, an employee meets with a counselor to talk about the nature of the issue. “We will brainstorm potential ways to cope with the situation—sometimes that will be a series of brief meetings, where we’ll identify and solve the person’s problem,” Teitleman says. Other times, a person may present with a longer-term problem that requires a referral to a therapist, a family counselor, or another experienced professional in the community. When outside help is required, Teitleman and Karen Brouhard, the FSAO’s other counselor, help to find the right provider.
“If it’s a relationship issue, we might take several sessions to discern if it’s a relationship the person wants to work with, if it’s salvageable,” says Teitleman. “We have couples therapists in the community we could refer them to with their partner for some of that work on repair. If, on the other hand, they’ve decided through several sessions that they either don’t want to stay in the relationship or they don’t know what they want to do, at that point we would consider referring them to another clinician in the community.”
Teitleman and Brouhard, both with years of experience in a variety of mental health and medical settings, have seen and dealt with just about every problem imaginable. They routinely help people to navigate workplace issues, from harassment and bullying to a bad performance review. They may serve as a sounding board for a supervisor struggling with an ineffective employee, a faculty member who needs help mediating a difficult relationship with a colleague, a family struggling with the death of a loved one, or a new employee who has relocated to Boston and needs help finding a mental health provider for themselves or a family member.
“People don’t have to have a mental health problem or symptoms to access our services,” says Brouhard. “So often it’s an issue that’s emerged in a relationship or in their personal life, where they need a little extra support, some assistance coping, someone to help them think through an issue.”
FSAO also helps people hoping to enhance their job performance. An employee may want help becoming more assertive, being a better listener, or learning to cope with stress so they can respond thoughtfully in situations, rather than being reactive.
“We’ll work with someone to help figure out how they want to manage their career,” Brouhard says. “We’ll help someone figure out if it’s time for them to move on from a job that’s not a good fit or that has them hitting their heads on the ceiling.” The office maintains a list of career counselors in the Boston area they can refer faculty and staff to as needed.
Often, employees seek out FSAO’s help for problems at home, such as dealing with the emotional fallout from a divorce, finding resources for aging parents, or parenting children with special needs.
The FSAO website provides information and suggestions for dealing with a host of subjects, including stress and anxiety (the number one issue for employees, according to Teitleman), compulsive behaviors, work issues, family challenges, relationships, coping with change, elder care, trauma, anger management, and retirement. There are quizzes that help identify areas where support is needed.
In addition to seeing individuals one-on-one or with family members, FSAO has customized workshops for departments and groups across campus, on topics from strategies for maintaining a healthy work-life balance to mindfulness as a tool for building resilience to how to talk to elderly loved ones about end-of-life issues to how to manage addiction. In times of crisis, the staff is often called upon as first responders, offering grief counseling.
“With a workforce this large, there are going to be deaths, there are going to be tragedies that affect our employees,” says Brouhard. “If there’s been an incident that’s affected an employee, a manager often will contact us to consult about how to support the employee at such a time. That might involve us coming in and meeting with the work group, facilitating the conversation, providing some critical incident debriefing.”
“I often find myself saying to distressed people that organizations per se don’t have a conscience, but the people who work in the organizations do,” says Teitleman. “That’s the part of the organization that we want to represent—the part that wants to see people treated well, treated with respect. One of the things I find most gratifying about our work is to help an employee with a problem this year, and then they come back next year with a different problem. That tells us that we’ve been successful with them, when we see them as repeat customers.”
The Charles River Campus Faculty & Staff Assistance Office is at 270 Bay State Rd. Call 617-353-5381 for an appointment. The FSAO also has a Medical Campus office, in the Solomon Carter Fuller Mental Health Building, 85 East Newton St., eighth floor, Room 818B. Call 617-638-5381 for an appointment.
This is a BU Today article.