Counseling Center Policies

The Counseling Center staff adheres to state and federal laws, and professional ethical standards which require that all client information be held in strict confidence. Within our program, any services you receive are completely confidential within the limits of the law. Confidential information about the services you receive from the Counseling Center is kept separately from your academic records at CSUB. No information about you or the services your receive from the Counseling Center may be released without your written consent.

However, state law and university policy do require that health and mental health professionals take reasonable steps to protect you and/or others should you report suspicion of child, elder, or dependent adult abuse, or the threat of serious danger to yourself and/or others. If you have any questions about the legal limits of confidentiality, be sure to discuss your concerns with your counselor. Your comfort and security is critical to the success of your counseling experience.
The staff of the Counseling Center welcomes your contact. We also value your privacy and time, and therefore offer the following information to help you decide on the best method for reaching us.

  1. E-mail is not an appropriate medium for personal counseling. If you are a CSUB student seeking personal counseling, please visit our office or call to make an appointment with one of our counselors.
  2. We cannot guarantee that your e-mail will remain confidential. While we will do our best to keep your communications private and will not disseminate them without your permission, our university administration, like many other employers, reserves the right to monitor our e-mail usage and might therefore see the text of your message. If you are in any way concerned about the contents of your e-mail being read by someone other than the person you are contacting, you might want to consider alternate ways of contacting that person.
  3. When we respond to your e-mail, we will respond to the address from which it is sent. If you do not wish others who may have access to your e-mail account you are using to also have access to our response, please consider another means of communication.
  4. While we check our e-mail often, you have no way of knowing if one of us is unavailable due to illness, vacation, or other reason. This means that your message may not be received immediately. If time is of particular concern for you, you might want to consider calling the office instead.
  5. Finally, due to conflicting demands on our time, we have had to develop priorities to help us determine how to best spend our resources. First and foremost, since we are funded by CSUB student fees, we place the highest priority on responding to CSUB students. While we welcome contact from others, at times of high demand we may not be able to respond to those not affiliated with CSUB.

We hope that these guidelines are helpful to you as you decide how best to reach our staff. We take your time and confidentiality very seriously and therefore consider it imperative that you understand the limitations of our use of e-mail technology.

Warning: a counselor's email is not considered a confidential means of communication, and so, it is strongly recommended that issues of a highly personal nature not be mentioned in emails to counselors. Also, due to the delay in response to emails, this is not an appropriate means to schedule appointments or address situations that require an urgent response.

If you would like to use e-mail to contact a counselor, please click on the name below:

Michael Harville, Ph.D.
Counselor

Eric Lord, LCSW
Counselor

Janet Millar, MA, LMFT
Counselor

Ruth Miles, MA, LMFT
Counselor

Ghazal Abbas, LMFT
Counselor

Jose Medina, LCSW
Counselor