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Mending Minds
Mental Health Counselors and researchers do the difficult and often elusive work of healing impaired minds and helping people to improve their perceptions of themselves. What keeps them motivated? Lesley Magazine takes a look into the lives of five Lesley Counseling and Psychology graduates.
Linda Paltineri '96 enjoys working with all aspects of family therapy, and for former police officer Carl Skeene '90, there's the assurance that he can crack the tough facade of unhappy teens. Diane Britt '9l is motivated by the potential she sees in the University students she counsels; for Martin Pierre '96 there are unanswered questions about coping mechanisms; and Therese Hicks '9l has discovered she has a knack for reaching into the inner world of psychotic patients.
"I didn't really know what I was getting into," remembers Therese Hicks about her first counseling experience during her Lesley practicum at McLean Hospital. "I was working with people with major mental illness, and I was basically pretty scared."
But during her next counseling experience, an internship at Winthrop Hospital, Therese discovered she had a real talent for working with people who are actively psychotic -- a condition which may include delusions or hallucinations that indicate an impaired contact with reality.
"I find it extremely creative," she says. "It's like intercultural or cross-cultural communication. They have a sort of inner reality that they don't really understand."
Therese is able to decipher what for others is 'crazy talk.' "I can reflect back to them the meaning of what they're saying, which helps them to understand themselves and reduces their fears." It's this type connection, Therese explains, that makes it possible to help someone recover from psychosis.
Before coming to Lesley Therese had been a missionary with a religious congregation for ten years, six of those living in West Africa. As a pastoral worker she led scripture study groups, trained teachers in scripture and did leadership training in Christian communities.
"I really loved doing that and being there," she says. But over time and through her own "spiritual and theological evolution," Therese and the church had a parting of the ways and she left the congregation.
"It was pretty devastating because I essentially lost everything," she says. Therese moved back to the U.S. and began a long process of recovery. She came to Boston to the Jungian Institute and "got involved in analysis."
Therese began studying psychology, and five years after her return from Africa, she enrolled at Lesley. "I had a lot of background in Jungian studies and a fair amount of background in psychology generally, but I found that the Lesley courses filled in the gaps very nicely for me. The other thing I liked was the one-credit course system where you can take a course like 'Eating Disorders' -- I found that very helpful because there is so much to cover in the field."
Before learning to be a counselor, Therese was skeptical that she'd be able to be effective. "I had been in therapy since my teens and had found it extremely helpful. But I always felt like it was a sort of magical process. So it was kind of intimidating to actually then be the therapist."
These days Therese works in the day treatment clinic at Eastern Middlesex Outpatient Center and has recently started a private practice. "Now, being on the other side of the whole process it still has sort of a magical quality to it -- especially when I'm working with psychotic clients. But there's still a numinous quality to the whole interaction."
Carl Skeene was 40 years old and trying to figure out what he wanted to do when it dawned on him that he really liked working with teenagers. He remembers thinking, "I'm pretty good at it, or at least that's what people are telling me."
So began Carl's journey to Lesley to formally study what he'd been doing while working as a police officer for 16 years, as a counselor in residential treatment programs for troubled teens for two, and as a crisis counselor in a special education school for another year.
"To me teenagers are teenagers. A lot of them have been dealt a raw deal in life. The more so-called 'difficult' they are, the more I'm attracted to them," says Carl. When asked why, there's no hesitation: "I feel confident that I can help them create some kind of a change and get them back on the right developmental track." But as experienced as he is, he claims it's not easy. "They're going to test you, he warns. "The thing is to not give up and hang in there with them."
"I know very well from Bob Fox -- I took every class of his at Lesley -- that we are in this business for a reason and most of the time it has to do with ourselves," says Carl. He feels completely comfortable admitting that his work with adolescents is linked to his own youth. "Actually I feel good about that," he says. "It's fun. I don't see my work as a job. It's a career.
In 1993 Carl enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. He is now beginning his dissertation on the impact of fathering on development of African American male teenagers .
As for his Lesley experience, Carl says he'd "do it all over again." He credits his Lesley education with his being well prepared for professional life as well as entry into a doctoral program. "I try to give back to Lesley. I can't do it financially yet but I'm willing to speak or share things about my own schooling or professional life. I have no problem doing that. I'm just giving back something that was given to me."
For Martin Pierre, meeting Lesley professor Merlin Langley was one of the significant turning points in his life. After teaching psychology and social justice at a boarding school for five years, Martin knew he was interested in counseling psychology. After meeting Dr. Langley, he felt compelled to learn more.
In fall '94, Martin enrolled in Lesley's counseling psychology program and he was very pleased with the welcome he received. "It was a family type environment for me," he recalls. "The faculty asked me to call them on a first name basis and that was one way they developed a culture of friendliness . "
Martin was enthusiastic about the program's focus on cultural awareness. "One of our courses specifically focused on issues around gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and issues of power and oppression," he says.
"And they did a great job of weaving the notion of race and cultural diversity in each class, so as students we became sensitized to a range of issues and the different clients we'd see."
Martin, who is African American, and other students formed a graduate student forum for support and named it COD, for Community of Diversity. The purpose of the group was to encourage dialogue and better understanding of the experiences of people from different cultural and racial backgrounds.
Cultural distinctions continue to be of interest to Martin, who graduated from Lesley last May. Now, as a doctoral student, he wants to "examine culturally mediated coping skills that are utilized by adolescent African American males in their daily lives."
Martin believes that "having mentors is essentially important." He credits Professor Langley's mentorship with getting him on a directed career path. "I developed my research skills with the help of Dr. Langley -- working on his research project and presenting with him at conferences. So during doctoral interviews I was able to present myself as a clinician as well as a researcher." Martin was accepted into three doctoral programs and is now in his first year at Boston College.
Martin experienced the other side of this mentoring phenomenon during his Lesley practicum and internship. At both sites -- working with paroled prison inmates and in an urban community mental health center -- the number of requests for counseling services increased during Martin's tenure. "Because I was one of the few African American men there," he acknowledges, "I was able to impact on the clients in a special way."
For years Diane Britt had thought of becoming a counselor or psychologist.
"I was almost thirty," she says, "and I was thinking, 'what am I getting out of what I am doing?' " As a studio artist for nearly ten years, Diane remembers feeling tremendously isolated. "I wanted to be doing something where I was working with people -- and I wanted that to benefit not just them, but me too."
So, to see if she'd like counseling at all, she took some psych courses and volunteered at the Cambridge Somerville Social Club. "I worked with chronically ill adults, schizophrenics and manic-depressives -- some with psychosis. I'd go in and talk with them, help make dinner with them, hang around and play cards -- and I loved it. I did that for a year before I went to grad school."
Although she had found her early experience with severe mental illness rewarding, later experiences with younger people she didn't like as well. "I found that I didn't like working with children because it's really sad and difficult. It's much different working with adults because they have much more control over their lives -- no matter what has happened in the past."
Through her Lesley internship at Massachusetts College of Art's counseling center, Diane felt she found her true calling. She likes working with college students because she finds them very hopeful: "They tend to be bright and they offer a lot to the therapist because they're generally quite motivated."
After receiving her master's from Lesley, Diane went on to the doctoral program at Pennsylvania State University. While there she continued working with college students at Penn State's main counseling center, where they have an emphasis on group therapy.
Diane feels very strongly about the efficacy of groups. "Group members can provide things I can't provide as a therapist: They can be role models, they can recreate family dynamics with the group leader and they can help people learn new skills, like interpersonal skills. They also can give feedback -- that's a really important thing -- and they can confront a group member where it's much harder for an individual therapist to do that."
The more distant perspective is also helpful to the therapist, as Diane attests: "You see things in group that you don't in individual -- people might come in and say to me: 'Everyone is mistreating me' or 'I don't have any friends.' But if we're in a group I can see if the person is withdrawn or is abraslve."
Diane is eager for April 1998 when she'll have logged two thousand hours and taken the exam to become a certified psychologist. For now she's excited about her new job. In January, just days after successfully defending her doctoral dissertation, Diane moved to Ohio to become a psychological counselor at Oberlin College and, once again, work with college students.
"For a new counselor, the work can be very emotionally draining," says Linda Paltrineri, a recent graduate of the counseling and psychology program, who has been in her job as a clinician for two months.
"Without a lot of experience behind me, my sensitivity is pretty sharp, whereas over the years, from what I understand, you get to a place where you can handle more: people's pain, carrying a bigger caseload and all of that."
Linda came to Lesley with a marketing communications background and no counseling experience. She knew that she wanted to work with an urban population and found Assistant Professor Dalia Llera's course on Gender, Race and Ethnicity particularly helpful in preparing her. "I also learned a tremendous amount from professors sharing their own clinical experiences and relating that to experiences I was having at the time with clients," she says. "The second really big piece was doing the actual clinical work. "
For her Lesley internship Linda chose to work in Dorchester in the mental health department of Geiger-Gibson Community Health Center. "I was working in a full health center so I had a lot of interaction with the physicians, nurses, pediatrics, the Healthy Start program," says Linda, "and I really enjoyed that interfacing with the medical model and understanding that whole piece."
An unexpected outcome from her experience there was working with children and families. "One thing I enjoy about the family work is all the different pieces," she says. "I really like jumping into the middle and figuring out what pieces need to be put back together or taken away or mixed up a bit in order for the family to work better together. There are also more people in the room there's something about the energy that I really like."
After graduating, it took Linda some time to find her job, but she was waiting until she found the community health center setting she wanted. Her job consists of three parts: she counsels kids and families at the center, does family therapy in a home based program, and two mornings a week, counsels kids at a local school. "I'm finding that this is a real learning process," she says. "It's really hard work and I think in some ways, harder than I thought it was going to be.
"What makes it easier for me to handle," says Linda, "is that I just really like to help people. I feel like I found the right career for me -- I found a really good match and that's very satisfying."
