Yohana B
- Research Program Mentor
PsyD at William James College
Expertise
Clinical Psychology
Bio
Hi! My name is Yohana and I am a postdoctoral fellow in Clinical Psychology. I specialize in children and adolescent mental health, evidence-based interventions (specifically targeting disruptive behavior disorders), and applied intervention research. I have experience writing literature reviews, research papers, and developing/presenting posters. I'm specifically interested in adaptations to evidence-based interventions and investigating ways to make them more accessible. With that being said, I can get pretty excited about anything related to psychology so would love to support you in your project! In my free time, I love traveling, taking care of my plants and exploring new spots in my neighborhood with friends. I have years of experience mentoring and supporting people in the graduate school process and would love to help you in any way that I can. Look forward to hearing from you! :)Project ideas
Why Don't People Go to Therapy?
There are significant barriers for people to access mental health care. But what are those barriers? And are there ways to reduce or eliminate them? This project would start with a literature review on barriers to therapy including cost, the prevalence of stigma in certain communities, and access to providers. We could investigate the differences of these variables within urban and rural communities and socioeconomic status. After we've developed a solid foundation on this, we would investigate a specific mental health clinic and examine their number of visits, what the patient population demographics are, how patients are paying (i.e., insurance, self-pay, sliding scale) and how many patients stop services after the intake vs how many stay to begin treatment. With consent, we could even gather qualitative data and interview patients to get a sense of what caused them to terminate services. With all the information we've gathered, we would list the specific barriers present at this clinic and hypothesize ways to reduce or eliminate them. For example, to address stigma, we would brainstorm ways to educate the community on mental health, therapy, diagnoses, etc. Maybe we could present at the local community center or host free Q & A's, etc. This would be an educational and explorative thought exercise that we would then back up with evidence using existing literature. This project could be presented as a research poster or paper and the student would learn how to conduct a literature review, how to collect both qualitative and quantitative data and how to synthesize this in a manageable, digestible way. One of the benefits of this project is that prior expertise is not a prerequisite, just an interest in expanding mental health services which makes this project accessible and attainable.