Couple, Marriage, and Family Therapy faculty, staff, and students are finding new ways to serve clients from all backgrounds
The Family Therapy Clinic at Texas Tech provides affordable, high-quality therapeutic services to individuals, students, couples, and families in Lubbock and surrounding communities. The clinic has faculty supervisors overseeing graduate student therapists from the Couple, Marriage, and Family Therapy (CMFT) program.
The clinic strives to benefit the community through education, professional service, and research in the field of CMFT. Services are available to Texas Tech students and anyone in the Lubbock community. With increased access to rural areas through its teletherapy technology, the clinic is opening its doors to more clients. Department chair, Doug Smith, Ph.D., LMFT, notes that the clinic's low fees and flexible enrollment are helping reach more clients from a variety of backgrounds.
"The clinic can provide services to address typical mental health concerns, including anxiety, depression, PTSD, grief/loss," Smith said. "The clinic can also help with couple/marital counseling, family relational concerns and child behavior problems."
The Family Therapy Clinic offered online services at the beginning of the pandemic. The clinic continued seeing clients through lockdowns, ensuring continuous care during difficult times. This virtual option is a convenient service that families, couples, and individuals still use today, along with the traditional in person sessions.
To allow community members affordable access to services, the clinic uses a sliding scale ranging from $10-$70 per session. This is a cost-effective way that students, families, couples, and individuals can receive vital care, needed to address hardships. Community members can request an appointment or get more information by calling the clinic office.
The clinic is a critical part of the mental health system of care in the West Texas area, providing over 4,000 hours of mental health therapy services to community members every year. It also allows a unique training environment for Texas Tech graduate students, preparing them to work in a variety of mental health settings.
"The graduate students are therapist-in-training and give direct service to the client or family system. Faculty supervisors give multiple perspectives for addressing the clients' needs," said Family Therapy Clinic Director, Nicole Piland, Ph.D., LMFT. "This training model is similar to the medical residency model, which allows for trainees to provide direct services to clients while being supported by the expertise of the faculty."
Faculty members and graduate students are dedicated to actively contributing to the field of couple, marriage, and family therapy by conducting research that focuses on the concerns faced by today's families. One goal for the clinic is to increase research and apply the information to clinical practice. Further research will ensure high-quality care and services to community members in the Lubbock area.
"The faculty are involved in one study designed to explore the experiences of clients who have received relational teletherapy services to enhance our understanding of the perceived benefits and challenges of teletherapy for couples and advance training guidelines for couple, marriage and family therapists," Piland said.
Families, couples and individuals can seek professional therapy services with faculty and students to help with a variety of difficulties. The Family Therapy Clinic aims to address issues including depression, anxiety, relational dissatisfaction, sexual concerns, grief and loss, child-parent issues, and other sources of personal distress. The clinic is committed to offering valuable assistance to local community members.