Forum Live: A Psychotherapy for the People
On October 8, 2021, PsiAN held its second “Forum Live” webinar. Forum Live presents panel discussions, interviews, and the like — live, free, and open to the public. The live audience can submit questions and comments, a selection of which will be aired. All Forum Live events are recorded, with the video appearing here on the PsiAN Forum soon after.
The webinar on October 8 was a wide-ranging, fascinating discussion of providing therapies of relationship, insight, and depth to underserved communities. In reality, access to individualized, open-ended, and intensive psychotherapeutic treatments is often limited by powerful forces, be they social, economic, cultural, financial or bureaucratic. Reductionist, one-size-fits-all, time-limited treatments, and/or in the words of our Advisor Todd Essig, Ph.D., “therapy by algorithm” are often touted as solutions to widespread issues in equity and access to quality mental health care. The result is a landscape where marginalized communities are less likely to have access to depth, insight, and relationship-oriented therapies.
In this Forum Live event, representatives from established and emerging community mental health centers from around the country come together to share insights on the paths to expanding access to depth therapies and tackle such questions as: How does a mental health center committed to these therapies provide culturally informed care that will meet the actual needs of the community in which it exists? How do we address the issue of therapist burn-out that results in the revolving door of employment in community mental health? What are the innovations necessary to create, structure, and fund a mental health center that allows for open-ended (rather than artificially time-limited) treatment? And what must change within our field or professional training landscape to better meet the needs of marginalized communities?
Our panelists:
Carlos Padrón, MA, MPhil. is a licensed psychoanalyst with a background in philosophy and literary studies. He has been a faculty member at the Contemporary Freudian Society and the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance. He is currently a faculty member at IPTAR where he is also the co-chair of its Diversity Committee. He teaches in the MSW at the Silberman School of Social Work in CUNY. Carlos participated in the documentary "Psychoanalysis in El Barrio" a film on working psychoanalytically with underprivileged Latinx patients in the U.S. Carlos has worked psychoanalytically in different settings and is currently a clinical associate of the New School Psychotherapy Program where he supervises PhD students in Psychology. He is the the co-founder with Dr. Tracy Sidesinger of the New York Center for Community Psychoanalysis.
Ida Roldán, Ph.D., LCSW, is former Academic Dean at the Institute for Clinical Social Work in Chicago. She is a graduate of The Institute for Clinical Social Work in Chicago and the National Training Program for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in New York. She is on faculty at the Institute for Clinical Social Work and a consultant for BUILD, a violence prevention organization in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. Dr. Roldán is Chair of the Board of the Kedzie Center, a community mental health agency in Chicago. She is active in professional and community organizations serving disenfranchised populations. Her area of interest is on how societal and institutional racism, oppression, and discrimination intrapsychically affect racialized populations.
Angela Sedeño , Ph.D. is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist who earned her doctorate at Loyola University Chicago with a specialty in child and family psychology. She is a native Chicagoan who has worked in community mental health since 1999. Prior to joining The Kedzie Center as its founding Executive Director, she served as Family Services Program Director at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. The Kedzie Center is the first of four community-funded mental health centers in Chicago, whose mission is to provide culturally responsive quality mental health care, regardless of the individual's ability to pay. The Center provides a full range of clinical services as well as mental health education, consultation, and violence prevention. It has emerged as a valued training site for graduate students seeking to practice insight-oriented therapy within a community mental health approach.
Tracy Sidesinger, Psy.D. is a psychoanalytic psychologist, currently practicing virtually from Brooklyn and upstate New York. Her writing and practice focus on gender and sexuality, maternal mental health, spirituality, and the arts. She is co-founder of The New York Center for Community Psychoanalysis, an emerging nonprofit psychotherapy clinic in Flatbush Brooklyn which will make psychological care accessible to all as a matter of social justice and equity. She also serves on the board of directors for the Museum of Motherhood as artist residency coordinator. Her writing can be found in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Journal of Mother Studies, Public Seminar, and Routledge. She is currently working on a collection of essays bridging psychoanalytic insight, interviews, and memoir to bear on the topic of feminine knowing.
Annika Sridharan, MSW, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and clinical social worker with 25 years of domestic and international experience in global mental health with immigrants and survivors of human rights abuses. Dr. Sridharan has and worked in Africa, Europe, North America and South America, providing psychological and psychosocial care for refugees and asylum seekers fleeing war, torture, gender-based violence and other forms of interpersonal harm and persecution. She has provided clinical care as well as supervision, training and program management at several torture treatment programs, including the Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Torture in Cape Town, South Africa; the Trauma Centre Cameroun in Yaoundé, Cameroon through the Center for Victims of Torture; and Survivors International in San Francisco, the United States. Prior to co-founding Partnerships for Trauma Recovery, she developed and led the Center for Wellbeing serving resettled refugees at the International Rescue Committee of Northern California in Oakland.