My name is Jon-Patric Veal and I am currently a graduate student in the clinical psychology program at The University of Memphis. Since the start of my academic and professional journey, I have been dedicated to giving back to my community and working towards positive change for Black people. I grew up as a Black man in southern Louisiana where I was constantly exposed to the poverty and systemic discrimination around me. An especially difficult challenge for me was the burden of existing in a culture that didn't allow for Black boys or men to be open about their emotions and any mental health challenges. Rather we were simply told to be strong. As a result, I set out to become a trained mental health professional so I could be a safe outlet for young Black teens to get the help they need from someone who looks just like them. Both in the past several years and now, I've had a great deal of experience working with underserved Black teens experiencing adverse effects of poverty and discrimination. Following my bachelor's degree, I worked with Black teens in a juvenile detention as a case manager and Black adolescents in two different inpatient facilities. I also worked with my local church for the past several years to organize a back to school clothes drive for Black high schoolers without the means to get new school clothes. I currently am working with my church to lead an event on mental health advocacy for Black men, and how to navigate the world of mental healthcare. In my professional experience, I've joined a number of service opportunities. One of these opportunities was a food drive during Thanksgiving for underserved Black families in the Memphis area, in which I was a student volunteer. Now while at The University of Memphis, I am serving in a role as a Student Liaison between our program's graduate students and the Memphis Area Psychological Association to connect students with local clinicians. Memphis is a predominately Black city with rich culture, and I aim to connect with more Black psychologists and therapists to find how I may be able to best help give back to the Memphis community. My ultimate goal is to open a cross discipline clinic that addresses mental health in the Black community, specifically for Black adolescents, through a lens of cultural humility. I am incredibly close to this goal, as I'll be a to open my own practice following the completion of my current doctoral training. Through opening this clinic, I'll be able to truly give back to my community in the ways that I'm best at. My dream has always been to be a resource for the young Black men in our community that are so often left without an outlet for their emotions. I ultimately hope to be that outlet while I make strides through systemic change for my community in all the ways that I'm able, whether that be through my career or hands on service in the community.

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.