In a storm of decisions to make and options to weigh, finding the best mental health care can be difficult. Income, insurance coverage and accessibility can be hurdles to overcome.
The Psychology Department Training Clinic, which is currently taking in students, staff and Austinites, offers low-cost mental health services done by therapists-in-training for $45 per session, with discounted rates going as low as $11, depending on circumstances like family size and income.
The training clinic is not part of UT’s Counseling and Mental Health Center, but it similarly offers a variety of care plans. While the CMHC offers potentially free care, there are restrictions on the number of sessions you can have.
“Our hope for all of our patients is that they learn to become their own therapists, and eventually no longer need us,” said Kate Metcalfe, Ph.D. student and student clinician at the training clinic. “As much as we love working with them, that’s the ideal — that they can go and live their lives happily.”
Student clinicians spend between 20 and 45 minutes preparing for every session. Examining updates from patient questionnaires, reviewing notes from previous sessions and brainstorming lessons relevant to each patient serve as teaching moments.
“Before I started training as a clinical psychologist, I didn’t realize how much therapists prep for sessions,” Metcalfe said. “(Pre-session preparation) is the tangible way that I take the on-paper (plans) and try to personalize it.”
Jolene Jacquart, a clinical associate professor and director of the training clinic, said student clinicians learn to provide mental health assessments and deliver cognitive behavioral therapy, an action-oriented style of therapy enabling patients to develop skills to lead their own lives. Licensed psychologists provide feedback and give clinicians advice.
“There’s a lot of oversight on (the clinicians’) care that they’re giving,” Jacquart said. “That’s another way we ensure that they’re both receiving the training that they need, but also that the people that they’re working with are getting high-quality care.”
Metcalfe said the clinic follows evidence-based practices supported by research to plan out care. Clinicians personalize plans to create specialized sessions for individual, group or family patients.
“Cognitive behavioral therapy is the main therapy that we do here, and it can look a million different ways,” said Olivia Brady, Ph.D. student and student clinician. “If you were to … read from the manual, it would feel very distanced and kind of cold, which isn’t engaging for a lot of people.”
Motivated by their previous experiences as a patient in therapy, Brady said they’re pursuing psychology to help others in the same way.
“Towards the end (of treatment), I feel really proud (of the patient) because I can see exactly how hard it was at the beginning and how much easier things are (now),” Brady said. “I know exactly how much work they’ve put in (when) we’ve been working together.”
