Emory University’s program with the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) district to provide a new mental health response service for APS employees, the Urgent Behavioral Health Response, has been a “lifeline” during mental health crises, Senior Director of Emory’s Faculty Staff Assistance Program (FSAP) Marilyn Lineberger said.
The program launched in April 2021, according to Executive Director of FSAP Paula Gomes. The initiative is in partnership with FSAP, which provides mental health services such as individual, group and family therapy to Emory’s faculty and staff as well as their immediate families.
Through this initiative, 11 FSAP clinicians are providing their services to APS teachers every Monday through Friday, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. The clinicians are a mixture of licensed counselors, family therapists and marriage counselors, all of whom are trained in crisis care, Nzinga Benton, program director for APS employee wellbeing and creator of the Urgent Behavioral Health Response, said.
When a teacher calls in a crisis, they are connected to a clinician on-call who helps to diffuse the situation in real time. Following the call, Benton said that the teacher is put in contact with more long-term counseling services and a contact point at FSAP. The contact helps facilitate the transition to ongoing treatment for teachers.
Benton, who is a licensed professional counselor for APS, said she was inspired to create the program after seeing the detrimental impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on teachers’ mental health. She noted that even before the pandemic, she was getting multiple calls a day from teachers in crisis; once COVID-19 hit, it reached another level.
Following the outbreak, the number of adults in the United States reporting anxiety or depressive disorders rose to four out of 10, a marked increase from the one in 10 reporting in early 2019. Teachers in particular were affected, with 75 percent reporting frequent job-related stress, compared to 40 percent of other working adults. Teachers were having trouble coming to work or even making it through the school day, Benton said.
“I knew there was something more we needed to do,” she added.
Benton began to reach out to others in her field, eventually making contact with Gomes and Lineberger.
“[Benton’s idea] was very much aligned with Emory’s commitment to various efforts and initiatives to make a difference within the Atlanta community,” Gomes said.
The service has garnered a lot of support from the Atlanta community, as well as from the teachers themselves, Lineberger added, recounting the calls in which teachers said that they wouldn’t know what to do if they weren’t able to connect to someone so quickly.
In the year since the program has launched, the number of calls received from teachers has decreased, speaking to the clinicians’ helpfulness and the program’s viability, Benton said. This program, the first of its kind, has inspired many educators around Georgia to reach out to Benton, wondering about what it would take to get their own version up and running.
