Tribeca Therapy Funds Two Scholarships For Second-Year NYU Students Of Color Pursuing Careers As Psychotherapists Who Will Begin Clinical Work At Tribeca Therapy In September 2021
Beginning with the 2021-2022 academic year, Tribeca Therapy is proud to fund two partial scholarships for second-year graduate students at New York University, emphasizing students of color who are pursuing a career as psychotherapists. While NYC is home to a wide number of pre-licensure degrees, NYU’s Silver School of Social Work is significant in size and has a reputation as the strongest social work program from the perspective of clinical training. This is important to us because we are interested in training individuals who want to develop clinical skills in the service of becoming psychotherapists.
In addition to making an expensive private university more accessible via the scholarship, we will host awardees as clinical interns for the academic year. In our internship program, they will be provided with extensive support, training, and supervision while they see patients at a reduced fee in our office. As of now, we have made a three-year commitment to offering the NYU Silver Social Work Scholarship.
Our NYU Silver Social Work Scholarship Is Part Of Our Dedication To Changing Psychotherapy’s Diversity Problem
Our NYU Silver Social Work Scholarship came about as a part of our commitment to action vis-à-vis anti-racism that was reinforced by the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests in 2020. During that moment, we recognized many feelings, but what emerged and remained was anger. We’re not in the camp that believes anger is an unproductive emotion, but an important response. The moral question, in our view, is what can be built with it.
In our practice, we understand that issues of culture matter tremendously in therapy. Part of our response to this understanding is our organization as a group practice, which allows us to swim in a sort of diversity of ideas. A group practice isn’t the norm in psychotherapy—typically as therapists advance their careers, they progress to a private practice, almost as a solo entity. Among the many disadvantages is the absence of collegial disruptors—people with whom you’re sharing your clinical life that can offer a fresh point of view, wisdom, or even criticism of the sort that may be uncomfortable but is necessary for growth. While these disruptors can take many forms, being immersed in close relationships with diverse individuals can offer two benefits. First, greater diversity increases the likelihood of colleagues having experiences similar to those who come to you for help, their struggles in the world, and what may be their unique or particular needs in therapy. Second, people who are different can challenge you to think beyond those markers of difference and stretch how you experience the world and, in particular, emotionality.
In general, psychotherapy has a diversity problem, both in regards to the lack of diversity of therapists and the lack of fluency of therapists in providing care to patients of diverse backgrounds and cultures. Similarly, while psychotherapy and psychiatry are distinct professions, psychotherapy has its own reckoning to do in relation to its borrowed assumptions from psychiatry and its own racism and culturally narrow history. We don’t believe these problematics are merely in the past. There is a reality of trauma related to racism, but also a diversity of ways that people from different cultures see the world. We believe psychotherapy’s diversity problem can’t be merely solved by cultural competency training nor can it be solved by training more diverse therapists; we need both.
Black, Latinx, and Indigenous People Are Traditionally Underserved By Good Psychotherapy: Our Solution Is To Train More Phenomenal Therapists Of Color
In relation to psychotherapy, people of color, especially Black, Latinx, and Indigenous Americans are traditionally underserved. This has to be understood as a set of component parts. First is a straightforward case of access to care, particularly quality care. Fundamentally, this is an economic issue that is a direct result of how we distribute healthcare, but it also includes the question of in which communities mental health services are located, as well as transportation and these sorts of structural concerns.
Then, there’s the additional question of quality. Therapy in minority communities is more likely to be short-term, rote or manualized (for instance, cognitive behavioral therapy), symptom-focused, hierarchical, and non-relational. It is also more likely to lead to a referral to a psychiatrist and therefore, to result in medication being prescribed to treat problems that may be well or better addressed with good psychotherapy. Additionally, services offered to Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people are more likely to be tied to institutions like schools and medical centers or directly linked to services like housing, financial, or food support, as well as the ability to maintain custody of one’s children or stay out of prison. In the second category especially, while individual therapists and clinics may do excellent, patient-centered work, that work is more likely to be, at least in some degree, in the service of the interest of the school, hospital, housing organization, or social service provider than by interests that are determined by the patient in collaboration with an objective therapist.
Another component part concerns the question of clinical competency of the therapist (we intentionally say clinical competency rather than, as is the fashion, cultural competency as this suggests the cultural is a secondary consideration to the clinical, which is unacceptable). As hard as the field has worked to prove otherwise, efforts to formulate an understanding of psychology as having “objective” truths that are applicable to all humans across cultures have failed. In truth, our understanding of human life, our desires and conflicts, our pain and suffering, and the nuances of how we live in relation to other humans cannot be separated from culture. You cannot simply learn a psychology (and a psychotherapy) that presumes to be culture-independent and apply it to all humans. We need to appreciate that even when questions of access to therapy and who that therapy serves are addressed, we have the additional question of culture.
One solution—and one we aim to bolster through our NYU Silver Social Work Scholarship—is to train more phenomenal therapists of color. Not simply on the assumption that they will provide treatment directly to people of color (though they may), but so that they can be more prominent in supervision groups, on faculties, as practice leaders and owners, as trainers and directors, as researchers, as writers, and as public speakers.