The OU Counseling Psychology Clinic has begun a pro bono program to reach out to clients who do not have means to pay.
The clinic is a training ground for the OU Counseling Psychology doctoral program and the masters program for community counseling. The clinic began offering its pro bono services around May due to area budget cuts, said clinic director Lisa Frey.
“I’ve been really aware, especially this year, they have been cutting funding to lots of programs all over Oklahoma but Norman has really been suffering because the amount of funding that has been cut from mental health programs,” Frey said. “There have been a couple of agencies that have closed, the counseling center at the Women’s Research Center was forced to close, there was a substance abuse program that was forced to close, so services have really been suffering in this area.”
As other mental health programs began closing, the clinic at OU began to see more clients with limited incomes.
“The final straw for me was, I had a conversation with somebody that had called in to seek services from us,” Frey said. “We offer services on a sliding fee scale, and our fee slides down quite low, we probably go lower than anywhere in the community. I had a conversation with somebody on the phone who was seeking services and couldn’t pay even our lowest fee, which is very minimal, and was talking to about something that they were needing to do to even feed their children that were sad, to say the least.”
With these clients in mind, Frey began to develop the clinic’s new program.
“For me that was an epiphany,” Frey said. “I thought to myself, I’m never going to have this kind of conversation with somebody again and not be able to have a program or some kind of service that I can offer them.”
Counseling is more than just helping the people that have the ability to pay for services, Frey said.
“I’m a psychologist and I was in private practice for a long time,” she said. “Not only am I a counselor but I have a real commitment to social services and social justice issues. I just really believe that people that become counselors or psychologist need to do it partly out of a service orientation to help people and not just the people that have the money to pay for services, but to help everybody.”
Frey said programs like this one will be important in the future if mental health budgets are continually cut.
“The community and the state is going to have a serious problem if we don’t meet the needs of some these people, as we continue to cut mental health services,” Frey said. “we’re going to see things happen in this state like, substance abuse rates are going to go up, divorces are going to increase, we are going to see some pretty serious consequences.”
Frey said she hopes the program will be emphasized as a teaching tool for students and the importance of this type of clinic will be recognized.
“I really want to emphasize the training component of it, how important it is for out students to be able to work with clients in the pro bono program and to really understand the constraints that people have to live under,” Frey said. “So the training component is really important.”
Brent Horner is a doctoral student who works at the clinic and views the importance of the program, not only to the community, but also to his career.
“These are people who sadly really tend to not have many options in their life and it can tend to be a really difficult time, even more so than most people we would see,” Horner said. “So from a developing counselor’s perspective it is a really good opportunity to work with somebody that has really tough situations and to have that experience of helping somebody of such a dire situation.”
Horner points out that the reason for the program is to help people.
“From a more philosophical standpoint, it is a chance for us to have an experience of reaching out in the community and have an orientation to social advocacy,” Horner said. “Tending to a responsibility to people and not necessarily to profit or pay or some of these other things.”
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bruenig 1 year, 9 months ago
More of this kind of thing.