Even as the spring semester at IUPUC winds down, Darrin Carr, director of IUPUC’s graduate program in mental health counseling, is gearing up to begin an ambitious project.
Carr stood in front of two wooden doors on the second floor of the IUPUC campus building. Inside the room behind him was a set of chairs and a couch nestled among white cinder block walls.
The room is now being used as a data collection lab for undergraduate psychology students. But in a few months, the room will be gutted and transformed into a student-run, faculty-supervised mental health training clinic — the only one at an Indiana University satellite campus.
“(The clinic) is going to open so many doors for us to do new things,” Carr said. “Now we will have a space we can call our own to do projects that we haven’t even thought of yet, including research projects or teaching things in a new way.”
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The training clinic will be named after donors Tom and Barbara Schoellkopf, who founded Tobar Inc., a Columbus-based oil seal supplier.
The project also received donations from David and Ella Elwood, the Heritage Fund — The Community Foundation of Bartholomew County, Clarence & Inez Custer Foundation and the Elizabeth Ruddick Nugent and Walter C. Nugent Foundations, according to a statement from IUPUC. David Elwood was honored in 2018 with IUPUC’s James G. Simms Leadership Award which recognizes inspiring individuals who have generously given their time, talent, and treasure to advance IUPUC’s mission.
“(Mental health issues are) seen sometimes as a weakness instead of a strength to recognize that there is a situation that you need professional help to get through one way or the other,” Tom Schoellkopf said. “As far as the training that will go on at the new center, not only will it help train professionals, but we hope it will be an open area for students to walk in that might want to be dealing with something with a professional.”
The training clinic, which is expected to be finished by the spring of 2020 and open by the fall semester of 2020, will allow students in IUPUC’s master’s program in mental health counseling to provide mental health services to actual clients seeking help while under the supervision and guidance of faculty, Carr said. The idea behind the project is to provide students with “direct, in-the-moment feedback” during counseling sessions.
Clinic design
The clinic will be 1,102 square feet and have a reception area, a family and couples room that also will be equipped for counseling children, a group space where eight to nine clients can be counseled together and a room for individual counseling sessions, Carr said.
Additionally, each room will be equipped with audio and video recording technology that will record counseling sessions that faculty members may use as teaching tools. The recordings will be piped into a seminar room located in the training clinic where faculty and five to six students can observe live counseling sessions.
Faculty members will also be able to access recordings remotely, and students will be able to wear earpieces, similar to Secret Service agents or television news anchors, that will allow faculty to talk to students in real time during counseling sessions.
“We’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, ask more about mom,’ or, ‘Ask more about substance abuse history because, maybe you should dig more into that,’” Carr said.
Carr said students and faculty will be bound by the same confidentiality rules as licensed counselors, and students and faculty will ensure that the services provided at the clinic are in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.
The standard exceptions to confidentiality under Indiana law will apply at the training clinic, including informing authorities of child abuse or neglect or the abuse of an endangered adult, a person who is a risk to others or themselves or to comply with a court order. Counselors can also warn the person who is an object of any threats, Carr said.
Students will be guided by faculty to obtain informed consent, which includes informing the clients before the first session starts that the session will be recorded and taped and could be viewed by faculty members and other students for educational or research purposes.
“If the client does not want to be recorded, they will be referred to another clinic,” Carr said. “That’s a non-negotiable aspect of the training clinic.”
Carr said video and audio files of the sessions will be destroyed “after a period of time,” most likely at the end of the semester in which they were recorded. If faculty members wish to use certain files for educational or research purposes after the allotted time, additional consent from the client will have to be obtained.
“You’ll see similar systems used to record (medical) surgery,” Carr said. “This is a very common teaching technique used in many different professions.”
In the planning stages
Though construction of the clinic is scheduled to start this fall, the project is still in the planning stages, Carr said. The clinic will either be free for clients, or clients will be charged on a sliding scale based on their income. The facility will be open to the public and IUPUC students. Carr said the range of services that the training clinic will offer has not yet been determined.
“We’ve got to make sure that we are crawling before we’re walking, and we’re walking before we’re running to ensure that we make the most effective use of the space as possible,” Carr said.
IUPUC officials said they raised $317,475 for the project since launching a crowdfunding campaign in April of last year. Officials were unable to provide cost estimates for the project because “the architects are still working on it,” according to Brenda Vogel, director of development and external affairs at IUPUC.
Additionally, Indiana University is not ready to make public the names of the architects or architectural firms involved in the project or provide an architectural rendering of the training clinic, according to Jay Lesandrini, an IU spokesman.
Founded in 2012, IUPUC master’s program in mental health services. Currently, there are 20 active students in the program, Carr said. The program has graduated 34 students since its inception, and six are on track to graduate this year. The program recently added courses in substance abuse.
Bartholomew County is part of a six-county region of Indiana that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has designated a “Health Professional Shortage Area” for mental health services. The shortage area also includes Brown, Decatur, Jackson, Jefferson and Jennings counties.
“We want to provide the same high-quality training (our faculty) had, which includes being able to receive direct, in-the-moment feedback,” Carr said.
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The IUPUC mental health training clinic, which is expected to be finished by the spring of 2020 and open by the fall semester of 2020, will allow students in IUPUC’s master’s program in mental health counseling to provide mental health services to real clients while under the supervision and guidance of faculty, according to Darrin Carr, director of IUPUC’s graduate program in mental health counseling. The idea behind the project was to provide students with "direct, in-the-moment feedback" during counseling sessions, he said.
The clinic will be 1,102 square feet and have a reception area, a family and couples room that also will be equipped for counseling children, a group space where eight to nine clients can be counseled together and a room for individual counseling sessions, Carr said.
Founded in 2012, IUPUC master’s program in mental health services. Currently, there are 20 active students in the program, Carr said. The program has graduated 34 students since its inception, and six are on track to graduate this year. The program recently added courses in substance abuse.
To learn more about IUPUC’s mental health counseling program, visit iupuc.edu/mental-health-counseling/full-time/index.html.
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IUPUC is celebrating its fourth annual IU Day today.
IU Day is a 24-hour celebration of Indiana University. The university will share videos and games online at iuday.iu.edu. Students, alumni, parents and fans are encouraged to show off their favorite IU gear on social media using the hashtags #IUday and #CrimsonCallout.
To donate to one of IUPUC’s causes, visit go.iupuc.edu/give. The public is invited to attend campus activities and alumni chapter events today. An IU Day table will be located outside the Division of Education in CC building on the IUPUC campus from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Anyone who visits the table wearing IUPUC or IU gear will receive free swag.
IUPUC will also host an IU Alumni event at the Republic building in downtown Columbus from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. today. All IU alumni from south central Indiana are invited. RSVP at iupuc.edu/alumni.
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