Community counseling and mental health clinic

CCMHC’s three broad goals are Training, the preparation of new professionals, provision of additional professional development activities for professionals in the field of mental health; research, the developments of new knowledge through research; and Clinical Service, the delivery of direct mental health services to deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The clinic’s personal structure is modeled after university-based rehabilitation research and training centers.

Graduate students will observe and assist experienced clinicians as they serve clients and families. As students become more experienced, they will provide assessment counselling, therapy, and case work services under qualified supervision.

This supervised clinical experience will span from one to six full semesters, depending on the individual student’s degree of specialization and areas of interest. The clinic will host and conduct training institutes, continuing education seminars, and professional workshops and conferences for professional practitioners.

The clinic will provide a central and coordinated focus for significant mental health and deafness research that relates directly to clinical service and training activities. This research will be conducted within the clinic as well on-site at collaborating mental health facilities. Students will be encouraged to pursue thesis and dissertation research projects. In addition, the clinic will serve as a location for institutional studies, designated grant and contractor research from government agencies and private foundations, programmatic research by clinic professional staff, and studies conducted by visiting clinicians, researchers and scholars.

The clinic will serve as a site for delivery of state-of-the-art models of counselling and mental health services to be offered to deaf and hard-of-hearing children, adults, and families members. It will also serve as a major referral and consultation resource for existing mental health agencies serving deaf people locally, nationally and internationally. It will serve clients from infancy to old age and will include such services as marital and family therapy, child oriented play therapy, school-related assessment, rehabilitation assessment and counselling, and neuropsychological,forensic and comprehensive clinical psychological evaluations.