What Could I Have Done? Faculty, Staff and Students in Distress
By Monica Friedlander
When it comes to safety, your best self-defense tool may well be your gut instinct. Listen to it.
That’s the bottom line echoed for two hours by a panel safety experts gathered on April 16 at the Alumni House to discuss safety on campus. “If you scratch your head and think, ‘that felt funny,’ talk to your colleagues, call someone,” said Craig Mielkarski, director of CARE Services. “In any distress, call — and call early,” said Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education Christina Maslach. And when in doubt whom to call, said Lieutenant Doug Wing of the UC Police Department, “Call us. We’re open 24/7 and make house calls.”
Held on the first anniversary of Virginia Tech massacre — the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history — the Spring L&S Colloquium on Undergraduate Education served as a somber and poignant reminder of how crucial it is for all members of the campus community to be educated and vigilant about safety.
“We haven’t found in 16 years of [managing safety on campus] one single incident that didn’t have a long history,” said Steve Lustig, associate vice chancellor of Health and Human Services, who moderated the event. “They don’t just pop up out of the blue. People were uncomfortable before something occurred.”
The colloquium, organized by the College of Letters and Science and hosted by Maslach, the College’s interim dean of the Undergraduate Division, assembled a panel of experts to discuss how to recognize and respond to distress that may affect any of us. The event, part of a series of colloquia organized regularly by L&S, addressed the safety needs of all members of the campus community — students, faculty and staff.
Risk Prevention: BRAT
To prevent tragedy before it strikes, UC Berkeley relies on an experienced emergency response and prevention system known as BRAT, for Behavioral Risk Assessment Team. The operation, in existence at Cal for 16 years, leverages resources from across the campus to work quickly and smoothly behind the scenes to assess risk and intervene at an early stage. The model is so successful that it is being considered for implementation by colleges across the country. “We really work as a team in conjunction with at least 18 units on campus to create a safety net,” Lustig says.
BRAT members have extensive experience to identify behavioral patterns and connect the dots when incidents happen. That’s especially crucial on a large and decentralized campus like UC Berkeley.
“We’re an incredibly complex community of 50,000 people,” Lustig adds. “All in all I think [the system] works pretty well, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that. But we’re also very much interrelated. When something goes awry, it has enormous ripple effects.”
BRAT is managed by four departments: University Health Services, the UC Police Department (UCPD); the campus’s Human Resources Department, and the Dean of Student Affairs. Any of these can be called upon in various crisis situations, as can many other campus resources, particularly those represented at the colloquium. These included:
- Nancy Chu of the Campus Climate and Compliance Office, which hears complaints from students, staff and faculty that involve incidents of sexual discrimination, harassment, or assaults;
- Doug Wing, responsible for UCPD’s Special Operations Unit;
- Craig Mielcarski, director of CARE Services; and
- Aaron Cohen of the Counseling and Psychological Services of the University Health Services (UHS).
All of them work as part of the campus threat assessment team, focusing on prevention, risk assessment and intervention. Their goal: to always step in at the lowest level of escalation possible and contain the situation before it erupts into a real crisis.
Behavioral risk is defined as a behavior that is perceived to be destructive, threatening or violent. Such behavior can take many forms — from verbal abuse or cyber-threats to personal and interpersonal violence or sexual assaults and everything in between.
Focus on the individual
The distress at the individual level, panelists stressed, is to be treated as seriously as any other safety concern. “For most people, prevention and safety starts with reaching out when you need help. This may be in response to an uncomfortable work or classroom situation or a personal problem or crisis,” Lustig said.
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That’s where CARE Services (for faculty and staff) and University Health Services, (for students), both located in the Tang Center, come in. Licensed mental health care professionals are available to assess problems, make referrals, and provide counseling and crisis intervention to impacted individuals. CARE also provides work group intervention, education services, and eldercare assistance.
“CARE is available to anybody, at any time, for any reason,” Mielcarski said. “We have drop in hours and there’s always someone to talk to.”
All services are free and confidential. The same is true for the UHS’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CPS), which provides counseling to students with personal, academic, and career concerns. The only exception to the confidentiality rule is when individuals are determined to pose a risk to themselves or others.
The range of stress factors affecting students is extremely wide, and most often involves transitional issues, such as home sickness, career choices, transitioning in and out of college, explains Aaron Cohen of UHS.
“If we can get students at that level, we can see some of the things that are developing before a serious situation arises,” he said. “Sometimes students come to campus with much more significant diagnoses, too: major depression disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia. This is the age when symptoms often kick in. That’s where classrooms or advising offices start witnessing behaviors that seem uncomfortable.”
Cohen also explained that their services are not part of a punitive process and should never be perceived as such by students, not even in cases where an individual may be brought in for evaluation as a result of an incident of any kind.
“We’re mental health. We hear you’re in distress and want to support you,” he said.
In addition to the better-known counseling services, UHS also has a social service department, which focuses on sexual assault, substance abuse and emergency medical care.
Moving beyond individual counseling, members of the panel (and BRAT) discussed everything from office safety to physical assault. In all situation, the panelists focused on prevention – notwithstanding active crises in which calling 9-911 is the obvious course of action.
Prevention work can range from consultation on how to set up your office space so as not to feel cornered in a distressing situation to requesting UCPD training for handling active shooting incidents. Just as passengers on a flight undergo a brief safety training session before planes take off, so should employees be made aware of their surroundings and develop an exit strategy. “It increases your chance of survival,” Lt. Wing said.
It takes a village
To demonstrate how BRAT works, the presenters highlighted a specific case handled by the team that required pooling resources from multiple campus units within a brief period of time to contain a potentially explosive situation. The case involved a range of calls, emails and conversations occurring at various locations on campus and involving different individuals, all of them describing a range of worrisome or even aggressive behavior from a male student. Each incident may have appeared as an isolated case to an untrained observer, but within hours BRAT’s response team determined they were indeed dealing with the same individual.
The first calls went to Chu because they involved reports of what appeared to be incidents of sexual harassment. Chu consulted with the UCPD and University Health Services for a preliminary assessment meeting. Together they devised strategies to assess the level of risk, provide support and personal safety to all individuals potentially being threatened, as well as support for the male student himself. Police provided protection and ultimately, when the student vanished from campus, blocked his registration so he couldn’t reenroll without all necessary procedures being followed.
Only by working in tandem and utilizing each other’s resources did the BRAT team contain a crisis that may well have escalated otherwise.
“It really takes a village,” said Chu.
The two-hour colloquium concluded with the participants in the packed Toll Room of the Alumni House breaking into small group to discuss more than a dozen different scenarios of distress and — with the help of BRAT members and other volunteers — brainstorm on strategies for handling them.
Concluded Lustig, “The whole system is intended to be proactive. Once a law is broken, we go to other systems. We want to pull in a team from all parts of the campus before that ever happens.”
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For comments or questions regarding future colloquia, contact Katie Dustin at 642-8740.
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