Reinstate the Faculty and Staff Assistance Program & fully restore mental health services for the UC San Diego community

UC San Diego has laid off four highly skilled, long-time clinicians from the Faculty & Staff Assistance Program (FSAP)—the on-campus team that provides confidential mental health counseling, crisis response, and group support to UC San Diego employees. FSAP has served the campus for 35 years as part of campus HR.

The four clinicians losing their jobs are:

• Izabel Caetano Francy, LCSW, PMHC, CEAP — 12.5 years of service

• Bryan McNutt, PhD, LMFT, CEAP — 7.5 years of service

• William Youngblood, MS, LMFT, CEAP — 11 years of service

• Christina Lambert, PhD, CEAP — 22.5 years of service

Together, they represent more than 53 years of dedicated service to the UC San Diego community.

These cuts slash the program by more than 50%. Including the director, only three FSAP employees will remain to serve over 24,500 faculty and (non-student) staff—less than half the recommended ratio of 2,500–4,000 employees per counselor.¹

The layoffs also eliminate highly specialized expertise. They include the only counselor on campus certified in perinatal mental health, as well as a senior clinician whose explicit role was crisis response and behavioral threat assessment—even as leadership claims the program is being "refocused on crisis response." With outside providers increasingly declining UC-sponsored mental health benefits due to complex claims processing and low reimbursement rates, FSAP is the only accessible or affordable professional support many staff can find. Cutting it leaves staff without care precisely when they need it most.

¹ U.S. Department of Energy, Employee Assistance Programs Implementation Guide: https://www.directives.doe.gov/directives-documents/300-series/0341.1-EGuide-2a/@@images/file

FSAP is not an auxiliary perk—it is a core support system that keeps the UC San Diego workforce healthy, resilient, and able to deliver on the university’s tripartite mission.

• Protecting mental health of staff: FSAP provides confidential counseling and group-based care that staff rely on to process grief, anxiety, burnout, substance use, and other mental health concerns—often as their only accessible option for professional support.

• Responding to crises on campus: FSAP clinicians provide critical support to staff after critical incidents and conduct behavioral threat assessments to protect the broader community.

• Supporting teams and leaders: FSAP staff tailor workshops and lead discussions across campus, helping teams navigate interpersonal communication, group dynamics, and neurodiversity, and providing leadership and management consultations that bring clarity and an unbiased perspective to workplace challenges.

• Sustaining specialized programs: The cuts eliminate Tritons Flourish, support for working parents, and Autism Awareness and Neurodivergence resources—programs that help UC San Diego attract and retain a diverse, thriving workforce.

• Saving the university money: Research shows that Employee Assistance Programs return more than $5 for every $1 invested², with productivity gains of up to $15,600 per employee who uses the service each year.³ An annual program use rate of just 1% covers FSAP’s full cost,² and EAPs measurably strengthen organizational psychosocial safety climate.⁴ Cutting FSAP doesn’t save money—it costs it.

When FSAP is gutted, everyone loses: staff lose access to mental health care, teams lose conflict and crisis support, and the university loses morale, retention, and the trust of its workforce.

² Employee Assistance Professionals Association, Workplace Outcome Suite Annual Report: https://cdn.ymaws.com/eapassn.org/resource/resmgr/research/wos_annual_report_no6_attrid.pdf

³APA PsycNet, productivity research on EAP utilization: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-11069-004

⁴ "Employee Assistance Programs and Psychosocial Safety Climate," PubMed Central: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9099973/

We are calling on UC San Diego leadership to fully restore FSAP so it can continue protecting the mental health and well-being of the campus workforce.

Here’s what needs to happen:

• Reinstate the four laid-off FSAP clinicians immediately.

• Restore FSAP’s full staffing and scope of services so it can meet the recommended counselor-to-employee ratio and serve all 24,500+ UC San Diego faculty and staff.

• Protect specialized expertise, including perinatal mental health certification, crisis response and behavioral threat assessment, and the workshops and programs (Tritons Flourish, working parents support, Autism Awareness and Neurodivergence resources) that serve the full diversity of the campus community.

University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119 (UPTE CWA 9119) is a labor union founded in 1990 by a group of employees who believed that workers across the University of California and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory would benefit from a union to safeguard and expand our rights. In 1993, UPTE members voted to affiliate with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a 700,000-member union in the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the United States, and in the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a North American national trade union center.

In 1994, 4,000 UC technical employees voted for UPTE representation. In 1996, 3,700 UC research professionals joined them; in 1997, 2,000 UC healthcare professionals followed suit. UPTE has grown to 25,000 as UC’s Medical Centers have expanded, and we have added new titles to all of our bargaining units.