My path to becoming a clinical psychologist had more challenges than I could ever imagine. The most memorable moment in my journey was during my time working at an adolescent in-patient behavioral facility. One of the kids on my unit experienced a traumatic flashback that led to some dangerous behaviors, both for himself and others. Following company policy, I put him into a physical restraint to keep him and the other kids safe. But I knew the restraint was only a short-term solution to a much bigger problem rooted in pain, trauma, and a lack of power. As a Black man growing up in southern Louisiana, I often found myself experiencing discrimination while fighting twice as hard for the same opportunities. In my personal struggle, I found additional motivation to positively impact minority populations, such as myself. The culmination of my experiences drove me to become what I never had: a kind and competent clinician who looked like me. I find myself among the Black men in Clinical Psychology that make up less than 1% of its population. In that, however, I recognize a unique opportunity to make an impact and be what I didn’t have. The culmination of my experiences motivates me to serve the under privileged. Lack of representation is one of many barriers to accessing care for minority and marginalized populations in our country. Another barrier, and arguably one of the biggest, to mental healthcare is insurance and the inability to pay for consistent, quality care. For quite some time, I have aspired to make positive changes through changing healthcare policy to include more billable diagnostic criteria and lower co-pays for clients. While still holding policy level goals, those lofty dreams will take time. My current focus is on the personal impact I can make. Specifically, following the completion of my doctoral training, I aim to open a practice that employs other clinicians from different backgrounds, disciplines, and training models. In this imagined multicultural, cross-discipline clinic, all partners would be required to take on two clients pro bono who are low to no income. Their efforts would be supplemented by grant or fundraising money tailored for charitable work. Coincidentally this personal goal is also what I would change about mental healthcare to make it more accessible. More clinicians willing to make themselves accessible to poor marginalized groups would make such a positive impact. As individuals struggle to pay for the costs of mental healthcare, other barriers arise in getting to providers. This can be related to transportation or allocation of time to prioritize mental healthcare. Telehealth is an avenue that I hope to utilize as a way to serve diverse communities and make competent care more accessible. Although it has challenges like crisis management and the trouble shooting, the benefit of reducing barrier of travel and time management as barriers is truly invaluable. The most innovative thing we could do to utilize telehealth is to provide clients with computers or tablets to use for telehealth sessions. In a similar way that schools give children laptops and tablets for homework, we could provide clients with the same so that they have more access to their services. I am committed to becoming a clinician, researcher, and advocate who expands access to compassionate and culturally informed mental health care. Receiving this scholarship would allow me to fully invest in my education now so I can focus on building the future I envision. The scholarship ultimately would allow me to pursue these goals with the focus and commitment they require, rather than being pulled back by financial strain.

My dream for as long as I've been in the field of mental healthcare has been to restructure our healthcare system in a major way for Black and Brown children. While an ambitious goal, everything that I have done thus far in my career has been to prepare myself for achieving this goal. I hope to achieve this in two ways. The first is to have a training level and resume sufficient enough to be credible when I am advocating for systemic policy change. I am currently completing training for my doctorate in Clinical Psychology, and once I am done with training I hope to create a research track that tackles inequities in healthcare for minorities. My hope is that the research I lean into will provide a meaningful path to lobbying policy makers for change that can be empirically backed. The second part of this plan is to directly provide support to marginalized people. Once established, I hope to open my own practice in which I can employ professionals from a variety of areas in mental healthcare so that we can all provide in-depth, cross-discipline care for people who can't access mental healthcare in a normal context. Dedicating my research, clinical practice and career efforts to providing competent, culturally informed care to Black and Brown kids is certainly a lofty goal, but one that I am very much committed to.