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About The Gevirtz School
Tania Israel Works to Restore Counseling Psychology’s Social Justice Roots
Tania Israel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology. She was the Lead Coordinator for the 2009 National Multicultural Conference and Summit, whose theme was "Advancing Our Communities: The Role of Social Justice in Multicultural Psychology." She is teaching a seminar this quarter focusing on social justice in counseling psychology. She is also a board member for the Fund of Santa Barbara. Was a delegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Has performed in local theater. Given her own varied activities, it’s not surprising that she claims, “I define mental health very broadly – it can’t just be therapy. If we can only provide another isolated forum for people to talk about being isolated, then we’re not providing the best service.”
For more than anything she has a drive to return counseling psychology to one of its roots – social justice. “When my colleagues and I were working on the Handbook for Social Justice in Counseling Psychology, we realized you didn’t see social justice represented in the literature,” Israel says. “We wanted to provide psychologists and students with a road map so now they can apply their skill set to advocacy, activism, organizing, research, and policy development.”
Israel’s own research cannot be separated from the community. She is completing a five-year National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) career development grant focusing on mental health services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) clients. The current phase of the research began with a survey of LGBT perceptions of the community. “Santa Barbara County is incredibly diverse in ways really relevant to the LGBT individual,” she says. “We have a diversity of ethnicity, of economics, we have an air force base, we have migrant workers, we have an area that’s relatively socially liberal. If we want an urban sample, LA isn’t far. If we were doing a national sample we’d never be able to reach so many groups. There’s a richness and transferability to these data.”
So far she has presented preliminary results to both the Pacific Pride Foundation in Santa Barbara and the Gay And Lesbian Alliance (GALA) in San Luis Obispo, but is also about to set up a series of community forums with the LGBT Community Collaborative of the Central Coast to, she says, “help interpret results and to determine the direction the project is going to go.” What interventions will best help the LGBT community? “One direction,” she suggests, “is looking at how services are delivered to the LGBT individual. This is true all over the country, often they are paired with HIV services as they are at Pacific Pride, but GALA has only LGBT services. That means different kinds of funding, different levels of staffing, different services. No one’s actually done research on these differences. I wonder, how satisfied are clients? What’s the impact?”
The survey, at least, provides baseline data for whatever interventions come next. “There are so many things we can do,” Israel says. “It could be anything from changing how Pacific Pride promotes it services to some community organizing kind of intervention. Can we create a meeting place?”
Israel couldn’t be more pleased that the NIMH encourages community-based research. “They’re realizing that if you develop perfect interventions in a lab, that’s lovely but it’s no guarantee they’re going to work in the real world. So for awhile there was a focus on translational research,” she explains. “Instead we’re now thinking, ‘What if you started in the community and developed interventions?’ Then you know they’d be relevant.”
Relevance is the key for Israel, and sometimes that means not just looking at the bigger picture but imagining how that bigger picture could change. “If we’re working with a client in therapy and know that the system everyone lives in is unjust, and we help them to adjust to that system, we’re not doing our job,” she asserts. “It’s important to directly affect the injustice in society.”