Becoming a Citizen Therapist

This book shows therapists how they can impact their communities by engaging their fellow citizens in addressing broad-based health and social problems.

The greatest untapped resources for improving our health and social well-being are the knowledge, energy, and first-hand wisdom of the individuals, families, and communities who have dealt with challenges in their everyday lives. Mental health professionals can learn how to leverage these relationships to enact broader, community-wide change, using practices that fall outside of traditional methods of mental health service delivery.

This book presents insights from the authors' two decades of work in the citizen health care model, in which they have partnered with leaders from a wide range of communities on initiatives designed to improve health and remove social barriers. Readers will learn big-picture strategies for identifying and developing community-level initiatives, from disease prevention to broader cultural challenges, as well as common problems that arise when doing this work.

Includes in-depth discussions of successful, real-world programs cocreated by therapists and community members, including:

• diabetes education
• anti-smoking campaigns
• political depolarization
• police interactions

Part I. Overview of Citizen Therapist Work

• Introduction: What Can Therapists Offer the Larger World?
• Chapter 1. Foundations of Citizen Therapist Work

Part II. Health Care Projects

• Chapter 2. Family Education Diabetes Series: Tackling the Diabetes Epidemic in an American Indian Community
• Chapter 3. Students Against Nicotine and Tobacco Addiction
• Chapter 4. The Como Clinic Health Club: Activating Citizen Patient Leaders

Part III. Family and Cultural Change Projects

• Chapter 5. Putting Family First: Resisting the Pull of Overscheduling Kids
• Chapter 6. The Citizen Father Project
• Chapter 7. Braver Angels: Counteracting Political Polarization

Part IV. Projects Dealing with Race

• Chapter 8. The Relationships Project With Young Black Men
• Chapter 9. Police and Black Men Project

Part V. Becoming and Succeeding as a Citizen Therapist

• Chapter 10. Case Studies in Other Citizen Therapist Work
• Chapter 11. Maintaining Citizen Health Care Projects Over Time
• Chapter 12. Funding and Evaluation in Citizen Health Care
• Chapter 13. Getting Started as a Citizen Therapist
• Chapter 14. The Citizen Therapist as a Person and as a Professional

Afterword

References

Index 

About the Authors

William J. Doherty, PhD, is a professor in the department of family social science at the University of Minnesota (UMN), where he directs the Citizen Professional Center and the Minnesota Couples on the Brink Project. In his career he has combined clinical innovations, including the specialties of medical family therapy and discernment counseling for couples on the brink of divorce, with a wide range of community engagement projects. In 2016 he cofounded Braver Angels, a national initiative to counteract polarization and restore the fraying social fabric of the nation. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Family Therapy Association. 
 
Tai J. Mendenhall, PhD, is a medical family therapist and professor in the couple and family therapy program at the University of Minnesota (UMN) in the department of family social science. He is an adjunct professor in UMN's department of family medicine and community health. Dr. Mendenhall is also the director of UMN’s Medical Reserve Corps’ Mental Health Disaster-Response Teams, and the associate director of UMN’s Citizen Professional Center. He works actively in the conduct of integrated, and collaborative, family health care, training, and outreach. His efforts in community-based participatory research and citizen health care initiatives address public health issues. 

This book is a valuable resource for therapists working in communities and with communities to address a variety of urgent psychosocial challenges, such as improving race relations, reducing political polarization, and promoting peer support in health care. At a time when citizen participation is so needed to strengthen our democracy, therapists will find this book helpful as a guide to expanding their role to include education, advocacy, and organizing for community-based problem solving.
—Jack Saul, PhD, author of Collective Trauma, Collective Healing: Promoting Community Resilience in the Aftermath of Disaster

Doherty and Mendenhall bring therapy and democracy together in an inspiring handbook that encourages all of us to become “citizen therapists.” They vividly describe real-life partnerships and collaborations between therapists and community members in which each person has expertise and energy to bring to community problems. The chapters include collective efforts focused on serious problems of our time, such as chronic illness, political polarization, and relations between police and young Black men. Are you feeling helpless in our current fragmented world? Has the COVID experience and political polarization rendered you pessimistic and passive? I strongly encourage you to read this book! Doherty and Mendenhall’s concept of “citizen therapist” is an inspiring recipe for reengaging our collective sense of agency, communion, and hope.
—Susan H. McDaniel, PhD, Dr. Laurie Sands Distinguished Professor of Families & Health, Academic Chief, Division of Collaborative Care and Wellness, and Director of the Institute for the Family in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY