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VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with the GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development.

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JACK DEVINE, HOST: Welcome to another edition of Alumni Aloud. I’m here with Dr. Rachel Manes. Thank you so much for joining us.

RACHEL MANES, GUEST: Sure, my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

DEVINE: So, you pursued a doctorate in developmental psychology. What questions drove your research? And how do those questions continue to shape your work today.

MANES: Sure, just to give some context, I started the graduate program in developmental psychology at the Graduate Center in 2009. And I graduated in 2014. And at that time my research was focused on looking at the relationship, specifically between physical activity, and mental health indicators, and children’s academic performance and achievement outcomes. So, for my dissertation research I used an already existing data set, so I did a secondary data analysis. And I looked at what I just noted, the relationship between physical activity indicators and mental health indicators and the academic performance on standardized tests, specifically in elementary school aged children and early adolescents. And at the time what we found, and this relationship still holds today if you are to look at the most recent literature that children and early adolescents who are more physically active and score lower on children’s’ depression scale, actually have higher academic outcomes than their counterparts. At the time that’s what I was most focused on and interested in. You know the discussion section of my dissertation looked at the policy implications and also the practical implications and perhaps at the time I wasn’t thinking about going into this field but clinical practice. How do we use this information to help children and families?

Once I completed that work, you know the way I was able to think about from then until now. How many years ago was this? It’s 2014 now. We’re in 2022, so we’re looking at almost eight years ago. You know I wasn’t able to look out and know at the time how I’d use my research today. But the way I general do it is when I’m with a client, a child client, and a parent client, a family unit client, most of the time they come into the practice that I work for and they’re not thinking about academic outcomes. They’re very concerned about how a child or adolescent is affected socially by the fact that they triggered by, suffering from anxiety and depressive symptoms. And in addition to how those hardships affect their social relationships. I’m very clear in helping them make the connection between these struggles and their academic performance and outcomes as well. Because often times what we find is when children are able to, what I like to say is, take the lids off the emotional container that fills up every week and they let out their feelings. And they become more vulnerable in the therapeutic space. We do see improvement in their academic spaces as well, so I try to make that literal connection for children and families at the beginning and overtime we see it come to fruition. And we see that they improve across a variety of contexts. Not just socially, but academic as well.

DEVINE: So, your research was driven by this connection between physical activity and academic performance and now you’ve kind of taken this connection into a different therapeutic space but more focused on the social aspect. Your clients are concerned with how anxiety and depression are affecting their children and the way they’re interacting with the world, so this seems like your research can apply in so many different scenarios and workplaces. Were there any other careers that you considered?

MANES: Absolutely. When I was conducting my dissertation research and the analysis, I worked as a policy associate for the New York Academy of Medicine on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. So, I worked in the nonprofit world, and I was working on at the time a grand funded by the New York State Health Department. And I went all across New York State, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, just to name a few. And I was actually putting those policy implications into practice. So that was my work in the nonprofit world. After I graduated with the PhD in 2014, I got a job as a Director of Policy, Wellness Policy and Promotions, at the New York City Department of Education. And I wasn’t at that job for too long, a couple months. The reason was because both my work at the New York Academy of Medicine and then at the New York City Department of Education, all of it was very removed from the population I had been studying for so many years. As is often the case when we’re analyzing data, we’re doing it behind a computer screen. I really felt like something was missing at the time. You know I graduated with PhD at 29 and that’s not to say that at 29 you don’t know what to do with the rest of your life but I still felt like there was a void. Even after obtaining this very prestigious and you know pristine PhD that I worked very hard for.

I just had this yearning to work directly with the clients. And because of that I decided at 30 to go back to school. I learned that in order to do that direct practice that I was yearning for I needed some kind of a clinical license. I researched several. I thought about school guidance counseling. I thought about going back for a degree in Clinical Psychology but that would have been a PhD and I would’ve had to start all over. And what I ultimately decided to do was to do an accelerated 16-month program in social work. I learned that the social work license was first of all very versatile, you could do case management, you could do direct practice in a therapeutic space. And I decided on social work for that reason. I obtained my, it’s the first social work license degree, it’s called the License to Master Social Work. Of Social Work rather. And you know in a certain way it was kind of like starting all over. I did two internships while in the master’s program. One at Lenox Hill Hospital’s outpatient clinic on the child side. One at Bellevue Hospital in their child protection center.

Once I graduated, I was officially a licensed Master of Social Work, I got a job at Bellevue Hospital. I worked in their child psych emergency room. Those were very acute cases. Those were with, I worked with children who came in with suicidal ideation, suicidal plans, suicidal behaviors. Also, self-harm behaviors such as cutting. That’s just one, unfortunately. And I also started working in a very therapeutic space at what’s called an Article 31 clinic. That’s the name that the state gives it. The clinic I worked is called and is still called the Neighborhood Counseling Center in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. Very special place. Accepts patients with all insurances, including straight Medicaid and there are very specific qualifications for straight Medicaid so it was really great training and learning because I got to work with all walks of life. Not only at Bellevue Hospital, you know being a public hospital we accept everyone regardless of insurance, but the same situation at the Neighborhood Counseling Center and that was a very special time. It was pre-pandemic, and all of the counseling work was done in-person. In both my Bellevue job at the time and my Neighbor Counseling job you really got to do a full body assessment of the client cause we were all like there in the room so was all the work.

After that I got promoted and moved over to a clinic called the Brooklyn Counseling Services well Brooklyn Counseling Group is also what we’re known as. And again, this is all pre-pandemic so I moved over to that clinic in 2019. And at the time I was seeing children and families in person and some remotely because at the time some insurances allowed reimbursement for telehealth work. And because you had the option of in-person versus remote or telehealth with some insurances, only the most stable, less acute clients we really saw remotely and I learned a lot you know, pre-pandemic doing both the work simultaneously in person and remotely. During that time, it came in let’s just say March 2020, I obtained the second social work license which is called the LCSW or the Licensed Clinical Social Worker certification. That basically meant that I could supervise other therapists and I did that for a period of time while also remaining a therapist. Then I had a, a little bit of a personal note, pandemic baby. I had a son in May of 2021. He’ll be nine months old this week, so I’m very excited. And after giving birth to him I moved over to the administrative side and at this point in time I still work for Brooklyn Counseling Services. I’m a proud champion of that organization and all of the wonderful work that we do and all of the people we serve across New York State. We are an entire telehealth remote organization now. We have switched over to being entirely remote and on the administrative side I not only work with therapists to help them with critical cases and difficult cases and help them understand the successes of the not so critical cases as well, but I also supervise supervisors of other therapists. So those are the steps I took to get to where I am right now.

DEVINE: Well first of all, congratulations on the birth of your son. That’s incredible to hear.

MANES: Thank you.

DEVINE: And it seems like you’ve taken so many interesting steps in your career since your time at the Graduate Center. That you saw things from the policy perspective at nonprofits and government organizations. Then you went and stepped things kind of on the more personal level. You were trying to fill a certain void that you were hoping to see in your life. You wanted to be experiencing your work on the direct ground level with helping people and that’s very admirable work. And so, I just wanted to take it back to your time at the Graduate Center since it was so crucial you know in leading to where you ended up with Brooklyn Counseling Services and the work that you do there that you’re very proud of. What role did the Graduate Center have in your intellectual development? How did your experiences at the GC transform you into the senior clinical supervisor that you are today?

MANES: Sure. I was very fortunate when I was at the Graduate Center. At the time, so as you have noted and I have noted, my PhD is in Psychology but I was with the Developmental, it was called a subprogram at that point. Since then, there’s been a restructuring. But at that point I was in the subprogram of Developmental Psychology. I was very fortunate because a woman named Dr. Maureen O’Connor was the Executive Officer of Psychology. She was responsible in collaboration with Dr. Tracey Revenson and many other people in the restructure. But Dr. Maureen O’Connor okayed it that a non-developmental subprogram, it’ll get a little confusing but I’ll get to the point in a minute, she approved that a Professor of Psychology in a different subprogram, so she approved that Dr. Tracey Revenson with the Health Psychology subprogram, I believe, and Tracey was also with Social Personality at the time, we had many different subprograms, but she approved that Tracey be my chair and at the time
I was an anomaly in that way because if you’re with the developmental program you have a chair of your committee who’s with the developmental program. But Tracey and I formed a special relationship early on in my Graduate Center student career and she saw something very special in me and she could talk more about this but what she saw was that I had interests across these subprograms. She suggested that my committee be very interdisciplinary and maybe that’s, I haven’t, I don’t have any colleagues who are still students at the Graduate Center, maybe that’s commonplace now, but it didn’t used to be that way.

So, it was novel that I had this very interdisciplinary committee and I’ll name off who they are cause they’re all still very special and important people in my life. Dr. Tracey Revenson was my chair. She’s with the Health Psychology program. The members of the rest of my committee were Dr. Martin Ruck. He was and is with the Developmental Psychology program. The strongest Developmental Psychologist I’ll ever know. And the third committee member Dr. Keville Frederickson who was at the time was the Chair of the PhD Nursing Program at the Graduate Center. She has since moved on from that role. And because I had this, in my opinion, fabulously interdisciplinary committee, I had a fabulously interdisciplinary dissertation. You know more than that they really helped me develop the critical thinking skills and the problem-solving skills that I have used across the different career points I’ve had since being there.

I just want to make a note, he wasn’t on my committee, but I also had the most excellent training from Dr. Gary Winkel who was with the Environmental Psychology program at the time. He has since retired. He is responsible for all of my research methods and statistics training. That is how, not necessarily my GC experiences transformed me into the work I do now, but that’s why I think the way I think now. And I have all of these different people to thank for it. They’ve really helped me look at every angle and through every lens in order to do the work I did then, of which I happen to think turned out pretty well, and now it my view it really took a village and takes a village still to help a researcher understand all the different contexts involved in both planning the research and understanding the findings themselves.

Now in terms of the transformation. How did these Graduate Center experiences transform me into the work I do now? I mean I’ll do my best to make that link but really based on everything I just said about the interdisciplinary promote, approach, excuse me, that I was fortunate enough to be able to take while in the program. It really taught me the problem-solving skills, the critical thinking skills, that I honestly use daily whether I’m advising on a therapeutic approach or making a referral to a higher level of care that’s needed or I’m thinking through how to help a clinician, let’s say, empathize with a client or a client population due to their station in life or life circumstances. You know my Graduate Center experiences really help me develop those critical thinking skills that I needed and continue to need to question why and how I do what I do every day.

DEVINE: So, the interdisciplinary approach really provided you this basis of these skillsets and critical thinking that assist you on the job—able to overcome the sort of many challenges that I would imagine that you face, the difficulties of working in such a hard position—so what were some of the challenges that you encountered as you transitioned into working in your position today but in the mental health field in general?

MANES: When I graduated with my degree in Social Work and I started working, so I had done an internship at Bellevue Hospital in their Child Protection Center. But then I started working in their Child Psych Emergency Room. It’s called Child CPep, that’s how they referred to it. And this is how the interdisciplinary approach and skills I had garnered earlier in my Graduate Center experiences helped me identify this challenge in particular. This was the chief one. You know a child would come into the emergency room presenting with sometimes a host of symptoms, as I noted earlier related to suicidal ideation, behavior plan, self-harm behaviors, younger children, when I say younger, eh nine and younger, let’s just say for arguments sake sometimes it doesn’t present as explicitly the problems are more oppositional in acting out behavior because the very younger children externalize their problems. They don’t internalize them as say adolescents do. But what kept happening time and time again the child would become the identified patient so the child would be the one who’s presenting and sort of is the problem person. And honestly all the time, I won’t even say nine times out of ten, you know a hundred percent of the time it’s not a child problem because the child exists in an environmental, family, social, academic context.

I think the most important context I just named was the family context. If the child is undergoing a struggle that’s hard for the child to understand, then it’s not just happening because it’s happening to that child. Something is happening within the family system. And it was very frustrating oftentimes to do these referrals when children would get discharged from the emergency room I worked in, they get discharged for referrals for individual therapy, but unless you worked with the family as a whole, you’re not gonna get to, in my professional opinion, the root of the struggle that the family is really facing. Which oftentimes is responsible for why the child is internalizing or externalizing their own struggle. So that was a huge challenge, and you know because I had this long history of education behind me, what did I do with that challenge? I decided to get more education. I thought that would be helpful and it’s been extremely helpful.

So, around the time that I transitioned from the Neighborhood Counseling Center, that Article 31 clinic, and Brooklyn Counseling Services, I also started a program at the Ackerman Institute, near Tribeca in the city, actually in the Flatiron District, and I participated in their family and couples postgraduate training program and it was phenomenal. I was able to work with a family in front of a one-way, one-way? I’ll be okay. I think it’s a two-way mirror if I’m describing this correctly where I had a group of commissions and a supervisor behind the mirror and they were watching me with the family and they called the phone in the room that I was in with the family and they would make suggestions in terms of how to, what questions to asks in session. It was the best training. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic I don’t think they returned to those offices with those mirrors and doing everything remotely which is more difficult, in my opinion, so I was able to face that challenge by getting additional training in family therapy. And when I work with children and families. Yes, maybe according to our electronic medical record, the child is the patient, but in the way I do the work and advise on this work with other clinicians and supervisors, the child is never the patient. It’s all happening in a family context. And you know you’re missing a huge opportunity and really doing the child or adolescent whoever you’re working with a disservice if you’re not working directly with the caregivers as well.

DEVINE: So, you’ve made it clear that education and training is so critical for understanding the problems that you deal with. And that this kind of background, understanding the child and the family context in which they’re operating in, without this sort of background and education and training that you would not be able to do the sort of work that you’re doing today. Current students are going through the same process right now where they’re learning that sort of information so that they can take the next step in their careers, so what would you recommend to current graduate students interested in a career in the mental health field?

MANES: Yeah. The first thing I would do is to do your research about the different kinds of licenses that are involved in working in the mental health field, if you want to go into direct practice. So that was a step I had to take post-PhD and in retrospect I think I should’ve done that research, if I had realized earlier on that I wanted to do the direct practice work. In retrospect it would’ve been very helpful if I had done it sooner. So, I would do the research about how a certain kind of license, because in doing direct practice you absolutely need one, is going to help you achieve your career goals. There are several. There’s the Clinical Psychology License which if I’m not mistaken you do need a PhD or you can get the Psy D option that’s doctorate in Clinical Psychology without the dissertation. There’s the Social Work degree which I choose, the most versatile. There’s a newer license called the License for Mental Health Counseling so you can also be a licensed Marriage and Family therapist. There are many different options so if you’re interested in pursuing a career or a job to start in mental health, I would absolutely do the research on the different types of licenses that are available, what’s involved in obtaining them, and most importantly, what can you do with this license. As I noted earlier, I picked Social Work because it’s extremely versatile but if I had been starting from when I was 25, it’s possible instead of going into the Developmental Program, it’s possible I would’ve gone into the Clinical Psychology PhD. That’s the first thing I’d recommend to students.

The second and maybe more important is just to be open to so many different kinds of directions that your degree program or people you meet can open up for you. It’s not that I wasn’t open. I just wasn’t as educated and aware as I could’ve been, you know let’s say a decade ago. And having the sort of bird in my head or on my shoulder more appropriately say: have you really thought this? Have you really thought about this? Have you really thought about this? You know I can be kind of stubborn at times when I wanna do something I just go do that. I wish I had been more open to possibilities. Not just with a Developmental Psychology degree but you know with many of other kinds of degrees that I was considering, you know even before I decided to pursue the PhD at age 25. So, I would think maybe more importantly in some ways than researching what license you’d like to obtain, just be open to so many different directions. That’s probably why I, you know, put my toe in the pool of nonprofit and then government and then ultimately mental health agency work, you know to really find my home which I’m so glad I found it.

Maybe the third is along the way testing out these different kinds of avenues or organizations to work for is just be kind to everyone. Be kind to every single person who comes into your path. I do believe that, you know, that being kind will help you jump from lily pad to lily pad or up the stairs, you know, metaphorically. You never know who can help you achieve whatever your next goal is whatever it is whenever you have it, so research the license, be open to absolutely everything, and be kind. I have learned that most recently from my current mentor Dr.Nicoletta Pollatta at Brooklyn Counseling Services. She’s our chief, our executive director, our owner, and I take her lead in that way every day.

DEVINE: Those sound like really great pieces of advice to me and even though I’m in a different field I think it’s applicable to me as well, so I’ll definitely take that into consideration. And I just want to thank you so much for joining us on Alumni Aloud.

MANES: Sure, my pleasure. Thank you everyone.

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