Q&A with Jolene Jacquart, Ph.D.

The BHC is the Psychology Department’s training facility for our clinical psychology Ph.D. students. The goal of the BHC, first and foremost, is to provide exceptional clinical training for our students. It is where they first learn to deliver psychological treatment and conduct clinical assessments with individuals seeking mental health services. It’s a very formative time in their education so we want to provide them with a safe and comfortable learning environment where they can work with individuals who’s needs match their developing skill level. We want to provide them with a diversity of training experiences and comprehensive supervision to not only help the students become highly skilled clinicians but also to support their development as clinical scientists.

That last point is very important to me as the director of a training clinic within a program that follows a clinical science model. Central to our program’s definition of clinical science is the belief that clinical research and application are reciprocally related. Meaning the best clinical skills are grounded in empirical and theoretical knowledge and clinical application continuously informs the evolution of clinical theory and research. At the BHC, we want to support the development of clinical scientists by providing our students with clinical training grounded in the latest research and ensuring they understand the theoretical underpinnings of the interventions they are providing.

A second goal we focus on at the BHC—that goes hand-in-hand with providing outstanding clinical training to our students—is providing high-quality and affordable treatment and assessment services to the UArizona and Tucson community. All the services our students provide at the BHC are supported by decades of research and treatment plans are designed to provide effective psychological care in a compassionate environment. Students are closely supervised by licensed clinical psychologists with expertise in their areas and students are matched to work with individuals who are within their scope of abilities. If we do not think we can provide the type of services or level of care to best meet a person’s needs, we will refer them to other providers in the community who will be capable of meeting their needs.

And regarding providing affordable care, because individuals are working with students as part of an educational experience, we try to keep our base costs as low as we can. We currently charge $25 per therapy session and $300 for comprehensive psychological assessment services. These rates are much lower than people will see in the community and for many these costs are even lower than the co-pay they would pay with their insurance. We also work with individuals facing financial hardships to address financial barriers to mental health care. For example, we have a sliding-scale for our services based on income and family size that can reduce the cost of an assessment to as low as $75.

The BHC serves Tucson and its surrounding community, including students, faculty, and staff of the University of Arizona*. We also provide some limited services remotely via Telehealth, which are open to anyone in the state of Arizona.

We regularly offer individual therapy services for a range of issues relating to anxiety, depression, and stress, including panic, worry, generalized anxiety, social anxiety, specific phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and sleep concerns.

We also regularly offer a variety of comprehensive assessment services designed to identify mental health disorders and provide diagnostic clarity. These include psychodiagnostic assessments, ADHD/ADD evaluations, and assessments of memory and cognitive functioning. All assessment services at the BHC include an initial interview to establish the goals for the assessment, the assessments themselves, a feedback session where the clinician will discuss and contextualize the results and answer questions, and a report that includes a detailed synthesis of the information obtained.

We also periodically offer therapy services for couples seeking support and we occasionally offer group services. Currently, we are developing an educational support group for caregivers of individuals with neurodegenerative diseases that will start this September 2023.

Since we are a training clinic staffed by graduate students who follow an academic calendar and have many competing responsibilities (e.g., classwork, research, teaching), the availability of all our services varies based on the number of students working in the clinic at that time, their availability, and the focus of their clinical training. As such we are often adding and removing services accordingly and there may be a wait for an available appointment. We recommend people consult our website for the most up-to-date information: https://psychology.arizona.edu/bhc

*Due to potential conflicts of interest, we recommend anyone with close associations to the Psychology Department at the University seek services elsewhere.

Absolutely. We recognize the importance of understanding the diverse backgrounds and experiences that individuals have, as these factors greatly influence their mental health and well-being. Therefore, we strive to be a safe and supportive environment where individuals feel comfortable discussing themselves and their experiences openly. Our clinicians will create space in the sessions to talk about cultural factors and social identities such as one’s race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion—just to name a few examples. These are important parts of who we all are and how we interact with the world and are important to discuss together in therapy. We believe that discussing these topics can foster a deeper understanding of oneself, promote well-being, and help people navigate the complexities of their personal and social experiences. Our clinicians are trained to approach these conversations with empathy, respect, and a genuine desire to learn from their clients' perspectives.

Moreover, we actively work to incorporate cultural responsiveness into our treatment approaches. Our clinicians are trained to approach assessments and therapy from a culturally sensitive and inclusive perspective, to be responsive to everyone’s unique needs, and to adapt treatment plans and approaches accordingly. They work collaboratively with individuals to ensure our approach is consistent with the person’s values, goals, and culture.

Since the BHC is a training clinic staffed by clinicians at different points in their training, we take extra care to ensure that individuals work with clinicians who can meet their needs. We recognize that meeting with a clinician for the first time can be an emotional and challenging process and therefore it can be very disappointing to go through that and learn that the clinician they met with won’t be a good fit for meeting their needs. Therefore, we have designed a pre-appointment process that has greatly improved our ability to successfully determine which clinicians at the BHC will be a good fit for meeting someone’s mental health needs:

We ask that anyone interested in seeking services at the BHC complete an interest form to provide us with an initial idea of what they want to work on and their contact information. Our clinical support staff will then follow-up with a brief phone call to review clinic policies and see if the BHC might be capable of meeting their needs. If it seems the BHC may be a good fit, the person will be paired with a BHC clinician to get started with the first appointment.

To access the interest form, please go to our website: https://psychology.arizona.edu/bhc

The BHC deeply values clinical research as an integral part of advancing the field of psychology and improving the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions. Clinical research helps us gain a deeper understanding of psychological conditions, refine treatment approaches, and ultimately enhance the overall quality of care we can provide. We believe that active involvement in research not only contributes to the advancement of the field but also enhances the professional growth and expertise of our clinicians. As such, we encourage and support our student clinicians to engage in their own research endeavors.

One example of this is our IRB-approved data repository that student clinicians can apply to work with. As part of our usual care practices and evidence-based approach to treatment, our clinicians administer questionnaires, surveys, or other measures regularly throughout treatment to assess mental health symptoms and treatment progress. With patient consent, we store their de-identified data that was collected as part of routine clinical care for research and quality improvement purposes. We are very fortunate in that many of the individuals who seek services at the clinic have been willing to contribute to the data repository. We have developed a rich and growing data set that will help us better understand the population the clinic serves and our treatment outcomes.

In addition to these internal research projects, we aim to collaborate with researchers in the department to support larger clinical research endeavors. The BHC recognizes the value of clinical research, and we want to actively support and promotes it as an essential component of our commitment to providing the highest quality of care. I encourage any researchers in our department looking for a clinical collaborator to consider the BHC!

Yes! We are always looking for ways to enhance clinician training and improve the care we provide. One initiative we are exploring that would impact both is upgrading our measurement-based care system, which is the regular practice of administering standardized questionnaires to patients in therapy to assess for changes in symptoms. We emphasize measurement-based care in our training and clinical work at the BHC because it is a powerful tool to help clinicians and patients identify treatment targets, determine progress, and inform adjustments to the shared treatment plan. This supports effective and efficient patient care as well as high-quality clinical training.

We currently use a very budget-friendly system that we created for electronic measurement-based care. This has been a huge improvement on the pencil-and-paper approaches. However, it is severely limited in its capacity to share questionnaire results with the patients and visualize symptom changes over time, which is important to be able to do as it facilitates the patient’s active involvement in understanding and directing their course of treatment.

The system is also cumbersome for both the patients and the clinicians to use, leading to lower engagement and use of measurement-based care overall. This is particularly disappointing from a clinical training perspective because we’ve gathered some preliminary data suggesting that use of measurement-based care amongst clinical psychology trainees is very helpful in their development as clinicians as it helps them gain confidence in their abilities and improves their understanding of the treatments they are using and their impact on symptom change. We would like to upgrade our system for measurement-based care to address these issues. We have identified an ideal digital solution but unfortunately, right now it is out of our reach financially. We are exploring funding opportunities that can help us make this goal a reality.