After forty years with the University, Dr. Philippa M. Coughlan, the creator and current director of the Office of Behavior Health for Students (OBHS), is retiring. As Coughlan prepares for the transition, a new committee composed of administrators and students is hoping to re-mold the office in order to address several concerns, including insufficient resources and a lack of racial and sexual orientation diversity in the staff. Despite multiple attempts by The Argus to contact Coughlan, due to a high volume of appointments, she said that she was unavailable to be interviewed.

“Students of color and LGBTQ students are not accurately served,” said Joseph O’Donnell ’13, chair of the Student Activities Committee (SAC) of the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA). “There is a huge disconnect between students and therapists, who are all over fifty and white.”

After an external review of OBHS conducted by experts from UMass Amherst, Oberlin, and Barnard, it was concluded that the underrepresentation of therapists of racial and sexual minorities resulted in the student body being underserved, according to O’Donnell.

“LGBTQ and students of color couldn’t open up to therapists, and [therapists] didn’t understand where they were coming from,” O’Donnell said.

One student of color, Kiara Williams-Jones ’12, was unsatisfied with the therapist she saw at OBHS.

“I really felt like I was telling him a story that he never heard, furthermore that he is never expecting to hear,” Williams-Jones said.

After four or five sessions with OBHS, she went to an administrator who recommended a psychotherapist of color in Middletown. She found that the therapists’ differences in experiences greatly affected how they worked with patients.

“The type of situations the [Middletown] therapist was used to handling really helped,” she said.

The lack of representation does not appear to affect the work of current therapists, however. According to O’Donnell, although 80 to 90 percent of students who utilize OBHS’s services are satisfied, it is cases like these that have inspired him, and others, to prioritize diversifying the staff.

On Oct. 10, O’Donnell and fellow SAC member Lydia Rex ’14 made a presentation to the WSA, outlining the problems with OBHS they deemed most important. According to their presentation, the Health Center and OBHS are unbalanced in resources, with the former receiving more attention and physical supplies. OBHS is also understaffed, which
forces students to wait up to two weeks and sometimes undergo non-intensive sessions. Therapists are stretched to help large pools of students.

“Hiring a qualified director for OBHS and improving its aspects is the biggest priority right now,” O’Donnell said.

A committee composed of Dean Mike Whaley, WSA Student Life Committee (SLC) members Jen Liebschutz ‘11 and Dina Moussa ‘12, and four to six pending members, will soon begin searching for the next director as Coughlan transitions out of the University. Whaley recently met with the current OBHS staff and the SLC to gather suggestions and review data about the current state of the center.

“My ideas have been informed by my research and shaped by my conversations with the current staff and others with expertise in this area,” Whaley said. “I expect that the new director will help refine our vision, goals, and objectives for the office.”

Whaley has decided that the center will undergo a name change symbolizing the new functions the center will perform. Through these discussions, staff, administrators, and students have suggested additional ideas including preventative education, students sharing the administrative burden, and sexual assault prevention and response.

According to O’Donnell, the hiring process will continue into the spring, and a new director will be hired by next fall.

“At this point it’s a matter of finally starting to collect some applications,” O’Donnell said.

This is an updated version of the original story, and clarifies that Dr. Coughlan’s retirement was not related to any controversy surrounding a lack of diversity in OBHS staff.