The Faculty Staff Help Center, which offers faculty, staff and their families professional and confidential counseling and consultation, recently opened a new satellite campus off Porter Drive in an effort to better serve the growing Stanford community in that area.
“We’re trying to make it easier for people to come see us,” explained Rosan Gomperts, director of the Help Center. “People could use the service there since it’s hard to get to campus.”
According to Gomperts, the satellite office will offer the same clinicians and services as the other two Faculty Staff Help Center satellite offices, which are located at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and in San Jose. Those services—including counseling services and departmental consultation and training—are free of charge to Stanford staff and faculty for up to 10 counseling sessions per situation for each employee and eligible dependent.
The Porter Drive office currently opens for two hours on Thursday mornings and is staffed by one professional staffer. Counselor Vinutha Mohan described the clinic as busy and well-utilized.
“We are very full,” Mohan said. “If I’m there for the entire two hours, I’d see about six clients.”
Mohan stated that the most common reason for client visits is the loss of a relationship or work-related issues.
“People come for individual relationships and couple counseling across all ages,” Mohan said. “We also have work-related problems, for example if a co-worker can’t get along with others. We also have people that come for parenting issues, dealing with children of any age, especially teenagers. Sometimes we have more difficult cases, depression or anxiety.”
Gomperts said that the Porter Drive satellite office’s hours and staffing might increase in the future should additional demand materialize.
“The new office has limited office time, just Thursday mornings, so if we run up against more people wanting to book times there, we’d have to look into expanding the hours,” Gomperts said. “But we haven’t run across that [problem] yet.”
Contact Catherine Zaw at czaw13 ‘at’ stanford ‘dot’ edu.