Today's crop of early career psychologists may be the most entrepreneurial and creative in the field's history. Faced with rapidly changing demographics, new systems of care and a demand for innovation, the newest generation of early career psychologists—those out of graduate school within the last 10 years—are tackling their jobs and inspiring change in a variety of imaginative and effective ways. We've profiled a sample of these innovators: nine early career psychologists who, when faced with a challenge, invented a new approach to overcome it. This list is in no way meant to be exhaustive, just representative—and inspiring.
Dan Libby
Teaching mindful resilience to vets
While teaching yoga and mindful meditation to patients at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in West Haven, Connecticut, Dan Libby, PhD, noticed that his students had better outcomes with pain and anxiety and needed fewer medications than those who didn't learn yoga. "One guy told me, 'Now I can meditate, not medicate,'" he says.
To make an even bigger impact, in 2011 Libby started the Veterans Yoga Project (VYP), a national network of 600 yoga teachers — many of whom are veterans — whom he has trained to help vets. Teachers learn about trauma-based disorders and offer an evidence-supported protocol of breathing practices, meditation, yoga exercises and guided relaxation that emphasizes "safety, predictability and control," says former Marine and VYP teacher Brianna Renner. "As a psychologist, Dan is incredibly skillful in supporting his teachers, who may have their own stuff to work through," she adds.
Libby, who studied clinical psychology at St. John's University, continues to teach at the Oakland Vet Center in Oakland, California, starting each session with a few minutes of breathing exercises to help patients learn how to focus and to regulate their nervous systems.
"Much of mainstream psychology [is] stuck in our heads, not using the resources that the body has for healing the mind," he says. "Breathing practices don't make problems go away, but they make it easier to talk about them and get past defenses."
Kristin Callahan
Better support for Head Start
A research stint at a Head Start center left New Orleans psychologist Kristin Callahan, PhD, yearning to spend more time in these settings to help teachers improve their classroom management skills and provide early intervention and psychotherapy to children and families in need. Last year, she found the support she needed to do that with the help of the Gulf Region Health Outreach Program funded from the Deepwater Horizon Medical Benefits Class Action Settlement for Lafourche Parish, an area hit hard by the Gulf oil spill. The funding enabled her to provide services to the parish's 15 Head Start centers. Local administrators were elated. "They looked at me with stars in their eyes and said, 'Where do we sign?'" says Callahan, who earned her doctorate in applied developmental psychology from the University of New Orleans.
Now, Callahan, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University Medical School, leads a team of three LSU Health Sciences Center clinicians who visit the 15 centers each week, observing classrooms, advising teachers on behavior management and referring children who need further assessment or counseling to the LSUHSC clinic. Most of the children are dealing with multiple stressors at home as a result of parental unemployment or income loss after the oil spill. Many of those parents also developed addiction problems. "I've never seen parental drug use like this; it is an epidemic in this community," she says.
But Callahan is helping to enhance the lives of these children. She meets quarterly with a local elementary school psychologist and pediatrician to identify any additional services Head Start children may need as they transition to elementary school.
Teacher-parent relationships are also improving, thanks to a workshop series Callahan presented to teachers on how subtle changes in their communication style — like leading with praise — can make parents more receptive to teachers' suggestions for changes at home that can improve learning at school.
"It's wonderful to see what happens when teachers start conversations with 'Let me tell you two great things Billy did today,'" Callahan says.
David Cosio
Giving patients choice in their pain care
People living with chronic pain fare better when they have access to an interprofessional approach to treatment, research shows. As a psychologist working with veterans, David Cosio, PhD, worried that his patients didn't know about all the pain treatments they could try or how they worked. That led to an idea: Why not teach patients about available treatments and let them choose which they want to pursue?
After gaining support from other health-care providers at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago, Cosio launched the hospital's Pain Education School in 2009, a year after finishing his studies in clinical psychology at Ohio University. Under the one-of-a-kind program, veterans and their families can attend weekly classes introducing 23 different pain care interventions that the Department of Veterans Affairs or its community partners offer, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, sleep hygiene, medication management, physical therapy, nutrition and biofeedback.
"A lot of pain management is self-management. I'd rather patients use their energy or time toward something they care about and are going to be consistent with," he says. "We're empowering them with the knowledge and support to do these things."
His preliminary data suggest that veterans who participated in the classes experienced less pain and fewer symptoms of depression, had learned more about how to cope with their pain, and were more likely to participate in their own treatments.
The program is beginning to have a broad impact. Physicians and other providers say that the program has also helped them learn about alternative pain treatments. Two veterans' outpatient clinics are also using the program via videoconferencing, and Cosio is talking with other VA hospitals across the nation interested in adopting it.
Daria Diakonova-Curtis
Fighting HIV in Russia
Earlier this year, the head of Russia's Federal AIDS Center said that the country had just registered its one-millionth AIDS patient, adding that HIV is poised to move from a syndrome among high-risk populations, such as injection drug users and sex workers, to become a broader epidemic.
Psychologist Daria Diakonova-Curtis, PhD, is working to forestall that tragedy. She is studying the behavioral and relationship factors that put young Russian women who are not considered to be in high-risk groups at elevated risk for contracting HIV, and is examining the best ways to convince them to get tested for the virus.
Diakonova-Curtis, who is originally from St. Petersburg, moved to the United States as a teenager. She returned to Russia while a graduate student at the California School of Professional Psychology, to collect data for her dissertation research on sexual assault there.
"My interests have always been in women's issues in Russia," says Diakonova-Curtis, one of the few American psychologists doing this kind of public health postdoc abroad.
After completing her clinical training back in the United States, she returned to St. Petersburg for a postdoctoral position, this time at the request of the dean of the psychology department at St. Petersburg State University, who recruited her to work on the HIV-prevention study. The study is funded by the Russian government as well as the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and Diakonova-Curtis says that her multicultural background allows her to be a link between the two.
She and her Russian colleagues are conducting a survey on HIV risk factors among women at public OB/GYN clinics, which serve all but the wealthiest Russians, and are testing a randomized intervention in which women opt out of rather than opt in to HIV testing. That's important, she says, because so many HIV-positive people in Russia don't know their status. Overall, she says, such research is badly needed. "This is some of the first work focusing on women in the general population [in Russia]."
Erlanger Turner
Boosting cultural competency
Although more than 12 percent of the U.S population is African-American, only 5 percent of psychologists are — and many psychologists may not have the knowledge necessary to work effectively with African-American clients.
Erlanger Turner, PhD, is working to change that, by developing online and in-person training programs to help therapists incorporate cultural factors into the treatment process.
"I've been interested in cultural competency and diverse clients since graduate school," says Turner, who earned his PhD in clinical psychology from Texas A&M University in 2009, and is now an assistant professor at the University of Houston Downtown. "I wanted to understand why there are these disparities [in mental health care], what some of the barriers are and how to increase engagement and prevent early dropout."
About two years ago, Turner's blog on mental health disparities attracted the attention of Cross-Country Education, which develops health-care continuing education trainings. The company asked him to develop a webinar and in-person trainings on cultural competency with African-American clients. In these trainings, Turner gives an overview of the importance of cultural competency, and also covers such topics as the cultural beliefs important to many African-Americans and how they may affect therapy.
Recently, as national attention has focused on high-profile police shootings of African-American men, Turner has also been speaking and writing about the effect of discrimination on African-Americans' mental health. On July 19, he led an APA Public Interest Directorate Twitter chat on "Stress, Discrimination and Mental Health." It was the No. 3 trending topic on Twitter for the day, reaching more than 986,800 accounts.
Finally, he is sharing his expertise with a national audience as a member of the behavioral health advisory committee to the Office of Minority Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is developing an e-learning program in cultural competency for all behavioral health workers, including psychologists, social workers, counselors and others.
"We know that the diversity of the U.S. is continuing to grow and change, and we know that psychologists' backgrounds haven't changed as much," he says. "So oftentimes you will be working with someone of a different racial or cultural background than yourself, and it's important to explain how that affects therapy."
Kari Stephens
Extracting elusive health data
There's a tremendous need for data on rural and tribal patients — from diagnosis to treatment — yet too few researchers have the resources to reach them and gather that type of information.
Working to change that is Kari Stephens, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington (UW), who is leading a groundbreaking project that helps community health clinics gather research data using electronic health records (EHRs).
Stephens directs Data QUEST, a project based at UW and backed by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences via the Institute of Translational Health Sciences, among other funders. She grew the project from a small pilot project she began in 2008, after getting her PhD in clinical science at UW, linking data across rural primary-care practices, to the thriving network and staff of five it is today. Data QUEST works with federally funded health-care clinics in five Northwestern states to link EHRs to enable health-care providers to easily access data on the patients they serve and share it to a central clearinghouse.
Researchers can explore the clearinghouse from Data QUEST's website (https://dataquest.iths.orgopens in new window) and request access. In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute on Drug Abuse are including the data in research projects. The data have also been used by UW researchers studying wellness counseling for Native American women and by the nonprofit DARTNet Institute to help clinics compare their work across many quality measures, "a tool they need and can use to improve practices," Stephens says. The team minimizes protected health information included in studies and scrubs data before sharing it with researchers.
The field of biomedical informatics needs more psychologists "to get squarely in the game of electronic health data sharing, content and use" says Stephens, adding, "With value-based reimbursements on the horizon, psychologists know how to measure meaningful change in patients' lives and can help inform how to best capture these critical data."
Sarah Ross & Tamara DeHay
Reducing the internship imbalance
Thanks to enterprising psychologists Sarah Ross, PhD, and Tamara DeHay, PhD, 200 more graduate students have secured internships that are APA-accredited or on the accreditation path — and more Americans are getting the mental health care they need. Through their consulting efforts, DeHay and Ross have helped more than 70 psychology internship training sites across the country earn APA accreditation, including sites in Alaska, Kentucky and North Carolina. Their company, Clover Educational Consulting Group, is the only national nonprofit providing comprehensive consultation services to accreditation-seekers.
DeHay and Ross offer hands-on support to sites that want to become accredited or create a new internship but don't have expertise on accreditation regulations. Internships seek their help in ensuring that the programs meet all necessary criteria to earn APA's stamp of approval, like having formal due process and grievance policies.
"The program has to have specific processes that protect the intern, appropriately involve their supervisors, allow for communication with the doctoral program and allow for hearing and appeal processes," says DeHay, who earned her doctorate in school psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. Many programs also need help defining their curriculum, detailing expected competencies and the evaluation process, and formalizing the steps required for an intern to graduate from the program—all accreditation requirements.
Once a program has been approved for an accreditation site visit with APA's Commission on Accreditation, DeHay and Ross, a graduate of the school psychology doctoral program at North Carolina State University, walk training directors and staff through mock interviews.
The two psychologists have 15 active projects and 16 projects in the pipeline, including a project to develop an internship consortium in Colorado and Nebraska that, if accredited, will be the first APA-accredited consortium to be located in multiple states. But what's most rewarding, they say, is seeing care expand in underserved areas and more interns move forward in their training.
"The [internship] match imbalance is such a critical issue for our field, and we wanted to be part of the solution," says Ross.
Michelle B. Moore
Coloring in powerful emotions
New Orleans psychologist Michelle B. Moore, PsyD, has created a novel way to help young children find their words in therapy: a coloring book that describes how such emotions as anger and embarrassment feel and helps children understand how their feelings affect their minds and bodies.
Moore based her "Colorful Emotions" coloring book on drawings she sketched as an intern working with a 9-year-old boy who was withdrawn and exhibiting depressive symptoms. One day, Moore drew the lines of a sad face for him and asked how the person in the drawing felt. The boy started to color the picture, and his words began to flow. For the next several weeks, he and Moore created drawings for his emotions and colored as they talked. "It became how we communicated," says Moore, who earned her doctorate in school and clinical child psychology at Pace University.
Recognizing that other clinicians could use the tool, Moore consulted a graphic designer and reworked her drawings for publication. Each spread features an outline of a boy or girl expressing an emotion on the right, and a verbal description of the emotion and two questions on the left, such as, "When is a time that you have felt lonely?"
The book is available on Amazon and has become a popular tool among New Orleans elementary school counselors and the parents of Moore's young clients, who often say they can't find the right words when they need to talk with their children. "I tell them, 'I came up with the words for you, you just have to read it,'" Moore says.
— By Jamie Chamberlin, Stacy Lu and Lea Winerman