Episode 71: Jennifer Baity -Therapist & Social Worker

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A transcript, lightly edited for clarity and length, follows.

VOC Covid 19 Podcast Jennifer Baity EP 71 Mix 1

[00:00:00] George Koster: Welcome to Voices of the Community, which explores critical issues facing Northern California communities. We introduce you to the voices of community thought leaders and change makers who are working on solutions that face our fellow individual community members, neighborhoods, cities, and our region.

[00:00:28] George Koster: This is George Koster, your host.

[00:00:33] George Koster: This episode is part of our series Exploring COVID nineteens impact on nonprofits and small businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area back in April of 2020 when we decided to create this ongoing series on COVID nineteens impact, first on nonprofits and then on small businesses in the San Francisco Bay area.

[00:00:52] George Koster: We like you had no idea how long the pandemic would go on and what the health and economic impact would be in our community. With vaccinations increasing COVID-19 cases and deaths decreasing. We're now moving into the summer of 2021 with the reopening of the economy and all of the uncertainty of our ever-changing indoor and outdoor vaccinated and unvaccinated protocols and the politics that will drive how we all come back together as a unified or fractured community.

[00:01:23] George Koster: We will continue to shine a spotlight on the nonprofits and small businesses that make up the fabric of our community, along with the founders and staff who are struggling to deal with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their operations, services, and sustainability, until we can all get to the other side of the pandemic.

[00:01:42] George Koster: Along the way, we will also share with you all the amazing solutions that our nonprofits, small businesses, foundations, and government leaders are working on to help us all get to the other side of the pandemic and come together to rebuild our communities with more economic, social, and environmental equality.

[00:02:00] Jennifer Baity: I think the energy devoted to treating mental health and reaching people who have mental health conditions is going to be on fire for not just this year, but for a while, because we don't know exactly how deeply this pandemic and the mental health conditions that came out of it. We don't know how long it's gonna affect people yet we just know it has impacted people and it will be for some time, but we don't know how long.

[00:02:26] Jennifer Baity: So people are gonna be in there and trying to offer services for a while on the federal level, on the state level, on the city and county level. This is mental health service expert, Jennifer Beatty. According to an April, 2021 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 55% of women and 38% of men say that the pandemic has negatively affected their mental health.

[00:02:50] George Koster: The pandemic has impacted our younger community members ranging from age 18 to 29 years old of age with 69% of women, and 54% of men reporting a negative impact on their mental health. I am joined remotely by Jennifer Beatty. Jennifer is currently a therapist in private practice who does training on motivational interviewing and other topics for various agencies throughout the Bay Area and beyond.

[00:03:13] George Koster: She also does clinical consultation and supervision. Previously, she worked as a program director of the San Francisco Mental Health Rehabilitation Center, where she worked from 2000 until February of this year, 2021. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

[00:03:27] Jennifer Baity: Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. So I'd love to begin by having you provide the audience, just an overview of your background.

[00:03:35] Jennifer Baity: I, I read a little bit of it, but you've been at this for a while in mental health services. Absolutely. I'll actually start back in college. When I was in college. I had a wonderful practice professor in graduate school and he basically said, if you're gonna be a social worker, you can do so many different things, and that was one of the things that attracted me to this kind of career.

[00:03:56] Jennifer Baity: That has been so true for me. My professor said first he worked with elderly blind people and then he worked in an afterschool program and then he worked here, and then he worked there and in policy and wherever, and that has absolutely been true for me. So my own experience was after graduating in 1994, I started working for Seneca Center and I worked in their therapeutic foster care program.

[00:04:21] Jennifer Baity: I did that for a couple of years, and then I worked for their school-based program working with kids who had severe emotional and behavioral problems, so they couldn't be in public school. So I was a school-based therapist in that program, and then I worked for their training department over at Seneca Center.

[00:04:39] Jennifer Baity: They're now called Seneca Family of Agencies. They're. Humongous now. They were tiny when I worked for them way back then. And then I worked for Edgewood Center here in San Francisco. This was before Seneca had a San Francisco program. That's how long ago it was. And so I worked for some of their school-based services.

[00:04:57] Jennifer Baity: I worked at Bessie Carmichael elementary school graduates. I worked doing some services in that elementary school. For the last 20 years, up until February of this year, I worked at a program on the campus of San Francisco General Hospital called the Mental Health Rehabilitation Center. It went through a couple of different names.

[00:05:14] Jennifer Baity: A lot of people still know it as the Murph, the Mental Health Rehabilitation Facility, which it was for the first, say, five years or so. It was open, but it's the Merck now. It's the Mental Health Rehabilitation Center. And who were the, uh, clients, if you will, of that center? Sure the clients there are largely clients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, but not all, you know.

[00:05:34] Jennifer Baity: Some clients also have severe intractable bipolar disorder or depression. There it is a subacute care locked facility After you come out of a facility that's more acute, like say seven B or seven C at. San Francisco General or the acute care facility at St. Francis, or someplace like that, you might be referred to a facility like the Merck.

[00:05:58] Jennifer Baity: Your team felt that you needed a longer term stabilization before it would be optimal for you to be discharged into a community program that was unlocked. So if you needed more time, skill building, like how to cope with your voices or how to cope with your moods. For if you weren't great about taking your medication every day and so needed coaching around that was what our program was for and so much more.

[00:06:24] Jennifer Baity: But that's the basics right there. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show besides being a long time friend, is you've been working in mental health for a really long time, and here we've had a global pandemic, and I would love to get your insights into how COVID-19 has not only impacted where you were working, but also mental health services in general here in San Francisco, and as we know so well nationally.

[00:06:47] Jennifer Baity: I mean the whole country, the whole world was thrown for a loop when this hit. Because say in the program where I was working, we had been used to doing milieu therapy. We did groups. Of course, no one wore a mask. We weren't worried about things like that. And then suddenly, you know, we were hit with COVID-19 and given.

[00:07:08] Jennifer Baity: We were on the campus of San Francisco General, it was a blessing to be on that campus to be, you know, where you were getting the hottest off the press news about how to keep safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Right. And so as soon as the pandemic, my team, it was myself and my supervisor, who was the supervisor for the whole building.

[00:07:30] Jennifer Baity: There's a couple of other programs in that building, and so it was myself and my boss and like. Four or five other managers, basically. And we started having a daily meeting about, okay, what do we need to do today? How can we support our staff today? What policies do we need to implement today? And then get all of that information out to our staff and then our staff and us along with management.

[00:07:53] Jennifer Baity: You know, how do we communicate this to the clients in such a way that the clients aren't terrified to death because. One of the things we had to do immediately was cancel groups because most of our groups were in smaller rooms where you couldn't really social distance well in those rooms, and so that made it very difficult for us to do more than a few groups here and there.

[00:08:15] Jennifer Baity: Like we had to move groups to the dining room area or we had a large activity room, but that left. A couple of rooms that we used really regularly for groups completely unused and clients going, how come we can't do this group anymore? And how come we can't do that group anymore? How come we can't do this other group anymore?

[00:08:31] Jennifer Baity: And us going, we really wanna do them too. We enjoy doing those groups. One of the groups that I used to do, or two of the groups that I used to do, I couldn't do, 'cause there wasn't time to fit that into the schedule along with what my team members were also doing. And so we had to kind of triage what is most important.

[00:08:50] Jennifer Baity: In terms of what services are most important that our clients. Receive what is required by, you know, say Title ix, which oversaw us in our facility, what can we safely do? What do our clients want? So we're always balancing what do they want, what do they need, because we can't just provide what they need without also providing some things that they just enjoy.

[00:09:11] Jennifer Baity: So that's part of it. We had to cancel passes outside the building. Which we always did. So we had to cancel passes where we'd take clients out on van rides out to Pier 39, or out to Ocean Beach or to the zoo, things like that, which you know, was part of our recreation program. It's also part of our community integration program.

[00:09:31] Jennifer Baity: We would take people to the museum, we would take people to the ball game, and we couldn't do any of that during the entire part of the pandemic when things. Got shut down, and that impacts how people feel psychiatrically and psychologically. And so people's symptoms got worse. Not better in a lot of cases.

[00:09:51] Jennifer Baity: And so we had people hospitalized for longer periods of time than, or shorter periods of time. And it was just because we couldn't provide the kinds of things that would make them better. We couldn't allow them to go outside because it wasn't allowed, you know? And then all the testing and the screening that we had to do all the time, E even if we had.

[00:10:12] Jennifer Baity: A hundred and some staff in the building and we had whatever, a hundred and some clients in the building. Even if one person might have a symptom, you know, we were like, so and so has a runny nose. We think it might possibly be this. Then we had to test that person for a period of time, and then we had to test everyone around them.

[00:10:34] Jennifer Baity: Nobody likes to be tested, especially, you know, psychiatric clients. You know, it's invasive. And I don't know if you've had COVID testing George, but you know, when you have that little thing stuck up your nose, it's really painful, right? And so to have that done to you in an involuntary care setting, it doesn't build relationship with your care providers.

[00:10:52] Jennifer Baity: Is what I'm saying there. Good observation didn't make the clients happy. You know, here she is with the prong, you know? Um, and so the poor RNs were just trying to do their job, or our nurse practitioner was just trying to do her job and they're the sweetest people alive. And sometimes we'd have clients that like, we really need you to do this.

[00:11:12] Jennifer Baity: And so we would have like their nurse practitioner and their nurse and their therapist and their OT and their psychiatrist would all try at different times, gently, gently, nicely, nicely to try and, you know, talk them into doing these things. And it was just a lot of challenges like that. And even vaccination was a challenge.

[00:11:32] Jennifer Baity: You know, obviously as it is across the United States, there's some people that are like, absolutely give me the VAX right now. And some people who are like, no, thank you, I don't want that thing. Even if. I hear it'll keep me safe. So there was a, just a lot of those things that all contributed to changing the quality of care.

[00:11:49] Jennifer Baity: And it's not just in our facility. I'll just say this was not unique to us. This was any type of community or congregate care type of facility. You know, this type of thing happened at. Say a nursing home that provided activities. This happened in acute care. You know, they had to cut back on the kind of groups that they were doing.

[00:12:09] Jennifer Baity: This happened in outpatient settings. This happened in inpatient settings. It cut across mental health services across the United States and beyond. So like knowing that it was a shared experience made it better in some ways. 'cause you could like Google, you're like, okay, what are they doing? What are they doing?

[00:12:25] Jennifer Baity: The Merck that I used to work for is the only city run mental health rehabilitation center, city and county run one of these. But there are some nonprofit ones run around the state of California, run by say Crestwood Center and other facilities like that. And so I remember at one point going, what are they doing?

[00:12:45] Jennifer Baity: Are they doing anything differently than we are? I wanna make sure that. Even though this is what I'm doing and this is what I'm being told, is there something else that I can be doing for clients that I just missed? And they're like, no, we're doing the same thing that you were. I'm like, okay. Because I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing some extra service.

[00:13:03] Jennifer Baity: I could legally be allowed to provide my clients that I wasn't providing, but we were all stuck providing a limited. Version of the services that we used to provide, and a lot of those services had to be provided one by one by the lcs Ws and the MFTs that I had working for me, the ones that I supervised, you know, as well as the activity leaders and people like that who were unlicensed, but providing a lot of the day-to-day activities.

[00:13:29] Jennifer Baity: Like they would open up the activity room so the clients could use computers and things like that. So over the many years that you worked at Murph, what would you say is some of the biggest impacts it's had on mental health service providers, but on the community of San Francisco at large? I'm glad you asked me that question because I think there's a lot of people who don't really understand how this facility fits in to the rest of mental health services in San Francisco.

[00:13:56] Jennifer Baity: Really, there's nothing that's gonna stop the revolving door of clients that have very severe psychiatric conditions periodically. Because these are chronic conditions where people do have relapses from time to time you have a condition like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or a severe substance use disorder.

[00:14:16] Jennifer Baity: Along with that, you can expect that every once in a while somebody's gonna stop taking their medication or their medication's gonna poop out, and you know they're gonna have a recurrence of symptoms. And so they're sometimes gonna need to be rehospitalized. And so there is going to somewhat be a revolving door where people are gonna be in the community for a while, they're gonna be doing well, and then there's gonna be a little flare up of symptoms like you have with any other kind of medical illness like you might have with a cardiac illness or diabetes or anything else.

[00:14:45] Jennifer Baity: So if you didn't have this level of care, what would happen is people would go to psych emergency. If they needed longer term care than that, they would go to the acute care units upstairs. At general. For example, they'd maybe go up to seven B, they would stabilize a bit, they would go to seven C, which is the less acute unit than seven B.

[00:15:07] Jennifer Baity: There. And then if they were stable enough from there, they would go back into the community. And for most people, that system alone works just fine. But there's a subset of clients that never works fine for that. When they get destabilized, they need longer term stabilization. That is reasonable for an acute care unit to provide.

[00:15:30] Jennifer Baity: And so what happens is if you are put in an acute care unit and you don't meet what's called medical necessity, you know, it's like basically what your insurance company will pay for. If you're not like super, super psychiatrically ill, and you're on an acute care unit, they're gonna reimburse your care at a really low rate.

[00:15:50] Jennifer Baity: And so it's the facility itself that ends up bearing the cost for a lot of the care. And so they wanna get you to a place where it makes more sense for you to be, instead of taking up their expensive bed where somebody else actually could benefit. Because definitely there's people out there that could use that bed.

[00:16:07] Jennifer Baity: So places like the Merck, the Mental Health Rehabilitation Center, were created for this reason. If you have somebody who needs longer term stabilization, you send them to a subacute place. Where they can get longer term stabilization. They can build more skills. You can work on whatever the thing is or the things are that they need before they could go, say, live with their mom or live in their own apartment or live in, uh, unlocked residential treatment or wherever it is that they need to go next.

[00:16:37] Jennifer Baity: Because if they went right there, they would probably not be able to stay very long because their symptoms would flare up or they might go get high. My background is I'm a licensed clinical social worker and I'm also a licensed events alcohol and drug counselor. And so when I was initially hired there, I was hired as the co-occurring disorder specialist.

[00:16:56] Jennifer Baity: So a lot of our services there were integrated and so we weren't just helping people with their mental health conditions, we were helping people with their substance disorders on top of their mental health conditions and helping them see that like. If you don't treat the one, it's gonna be really hard to manage the other.

[00:17:13] Jennifer Baity: So we did groups for both things. We did individual counseling for both things. The psychiatrist treated people for both things and would provide medications for both things. You know, we provide medication, assisted treatment and you know, gave people Narcan when they were leaving and all that kind of thing.

[00:17:29] Jennifer Baity: So, you know, make sure we were treating the whole person. So basically we're saving the system. Money is one thing. We're also making sure that the clients were getting the best possible care by allowing them to have the time for rehabilitation that they needed. So now you've segued out of Murph and you're out on your own.

[00:17:49] Jennifer Baity: Could you share a little bit about what you're doing these days? And then the follow on to that would be how can people get engaged with you? Sure. My segue out is hard for me 'cause I've worked there for 20 and a half years and I loved that place. I loved my clients there. I still wanna go back and be like, how are the clients doing?

[00:18:09] Jennifer Baity: I, I can't do that because of hipaa, but I still wanna know how each and every client that I worked with there is doing. I mean, I still wanna know how my foster kids from the nineties are doing. It's just how I roll. So for me it was hard to let go. It's like I let go of. Fingernails attached. But I spent a lot of time during the pandemic, as I think a lot of people did, you know, doing some reevaluation about, well, is this what I wanna keep doing forever?

[00:18:31] Jennifer Baity: Forever? Or is this time for me to do something else? And I really was starting to think that I wanted to get back into doing more direct service work since I had been doing more management work. I was doing clinical supervision, I ran my groups and everything, but it was still, it wasn't. Enough one-to-one for me.

[00:18:48] Jennifer Baity: And so I missed that so much. I really missed, you know, seeing people in, in single session one-to-one saying, what's going on for you and how can I be helpful to you? So in February I decided to go into private practice and I'm still running my training business on the side, which I've been doing for 20 years plus.

[00:19:07] Jennifer Baity: And that's my life now. I work for myself. I'm my own boss and I've never been my own boss in my whole life. And so, you know, I was kinda like, oh, how's that gonna go? But that's been going great. So how can people get in touch with me? You know, I have a website, so www.jenniferbeatty.com. I know you're gonna have a link to it, probably somewhere on the webpage.

[00:19:24] Jennifer Baity: 'cause my last name is hard to spell. It's like the word bait with a Y at the end. So, you know, if you wanna get in touch with me, if you are seeking counseling for, you know, anxiety or depression or PTSD or something like that, or substance use or some combination of all of that, I am seeing a small number of clients in my private practice.

[00:19:41] Jennifer Baity: And again, I'm, I love training people at large agencies and small agencies on different topics. I was just gonna say, tell the audience a little bit more about your training piece as well. So for the last 20 years, I've been doing trainings at different agencies. It started when I left Seneca as a clinician.

[00:19:59] Jennifer Baity: I started doing, uh, little two hour trainings for them on substance use at each of their programs. And that turned into a 15 hour pre-licensure class on a substance use disorder. You know, if you're gonna be a, a licensed MARIT and family therapist or a, a licensed clinical social worker or an LPCC, you have to have a minimum of 15 hours in training in this area.

[00:20:22] Jennifer Baity: So one of the folks that ran the training department at the time was like, well, we develop a training like that. And I was like, okay, that sounds like that would be easy for me to do. Okay, just put some PowerPoint slides together, follow these guidelines. I can do that. And of course it scared me 'cause it was new and it was longer.

[00:20:38] Jennifer Baity: But once I put it together, I was like. I like doing this. This is fun. So I put that one together and then I put another one together in another area and another one together in another area. And then when I started working for the Merck, I got hired as the co-occurring disorder specialist. And so one of the things I was trained in almost immediately upon working there.

[00:20:58] Jennifer Baity: Was, I was lucky enough to get trained by Dr. William Miller and one of his colleagues down at University of New Mexico in motivational interviewing, and it changed my life. I can't even tell you. It's like, if you're not familiar with it, it's a very, very useful clinical method of helping people who aren't necessarily, they're ambivalent about change, but it helps to get less ambivalent about making a positive change in their life.

[00:21:20] Jennifer Baity: So if somebody say, well, maybe they're binge drinking and it doesn't cause a lot of problems. Most of the time, but is causing major problems, say at home. Or they binge drink on Sunday night, maybe they don't show up to work on Monday morning. And so it's having a low key clinical conversation with somebody about it where I'm not, you know, trying to high pressure sales them into being like, well, you know what?

[00:21:42] Jennifer Baity: You need to stop binge drinking. But instead just having them evaluate what do they think about it? What do they think the pros are? What do they think the cons are? What do they think the pros might be of making a change in that behavior? What do they think the drawbacks in making a change in that behavior might be?

[00:21:59] Jennifer Baity: And then basically helping them come to their own decision about it through a lot of Socratic questioning, reflective listening, which helps 'em feel really supportive through the process. Because you know, for me, I don't think it should be up to me to decide what somebody should do with their life. So it really fits with my personality.

[00:22:16] Jennifer Baity: It's like I shouldn't be pushing somebody to do something, somebody should want to do the thing. And so I teach how to do that kind of counseling. There's some other counseling styles that I teach as well. I teach people about schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and things like that. So basically, I've worked in this field a long time.

[00:22:34] Jennifer Baity: I have a bunch of trainings that are already developed and that are up on my website, but if there's something specific that somebody would want training on, I'm also very happy to develop that for them. Thank you. That was great. I've never heard the whole story of all of your training in the many decades of working on it.

[00:22:49] Jennifer Baity: Speaking of many decades of working in this space, could you share with the audience perhaps one of your favorite stories? Sure. You know, it's so hard when you ask for like one of the favorite stories because it's always like, there's never one. I think back to a client that I worked with at Seneca back when I was a brand new social worker.

[00:23:06] Jennifer Baity: You know, a kid that I worked with. Who came from just this horrific traumatic background who you would predict would have just a horrific life trajectory. But you know, instead while we worked with him, went on to like make it as the star basketball player on his team, it was in the newspaper, you know, and you're just like, that's just such a wonderful, wonderful moment to be this kid's therapist and social worker.

[00:23:29] Jennifer Baity: So that's like a moment. I've had clients like this at my most recent job at the Merck. I have a client like this right now in my private practice, so it doesn't matter if I'm working with somebody who has schizophrenia, who's working on their substance use, or if I have a client like in my private practice.

[00:23:44] Jennifer Baity: I was working with a client very recently in my private practice. She is trying to cut back on different aspects of her drug use. So I'm working with her on a harm reduction plan, and she was going to this nine hour party and there was gonna be tons of cocaine there and she didn't wanna use cocaine, and she knew that it was gonna be extraordinarily difficult for her not to do it because.

[00:24:07] Jennifer Baity: You know, that was a thing that she really enjoyed doing. So we came up with this plan where she was like bringing a friend with her. She was gonna allow herself to drink alcohol, but she had a limit. If she really wanted to get like that stimulant buzz, she brought a Red Bull with her. So when her boyfriend went off to, you know, go use Coke at the party.

[00:24:26] Jennifer Baity: She was like, I have a plan. It's fine. I'm gonna go hang out with my friend. I'm gonna chug my Red Bull. And she did that. And you know, she occupied herself with other things that we had talked about doing. And anyway, it went perfectly for her. Bottom line. It's almost so exciting to me. It's like client has a goal.

[00:24:41] Jennifer Baity: We come up with a plan, client achieves goals. It's like, for me it's just, it's always just that. It's helping people do the things they want to do. On the training side, about 15 years ago when I was just starting to kind of make a name for myself doing these kinds of trainings and, and not very well known in DPH at all Department of Public Health, and they hired me to do a training for 200 therapists to work for the Department of Public Health.

[00:25:08] Jennifer Baity: And I, I forget the exact title, but it was basically something like what every therapist needs to know about drugs and alcohol in order to do their work is like drugs and alcohol 1 0 1 kind of a thing. And to be able to do that was one of my goals. And I was out there looking at this sea of 200 therapists who mostly knew about mental health and not a lot about substance use.

[00:25:29] Jennifer Baity: That's something I always wanted to do, and I got to do that, and I was like, yes. That felt really good. You know, it felt. Good to be able to fill that knowledge gap for some people. And that's one of the things I like about training. Like I was doing a training recently, opioid use disorder. And you know, one of the things that I think a lot of people don't seem to fully understand is that medication assisted therapy, you know, being on buprenorphine or being on methadone really, really helps that most people who don't receive that relapse very quickly.

[00:26:02] Jennifer Baity: And sometimes their relapses are more likely to be fatal if they're not on, uh, medication assisted treatment. So there's a lot of people who, if you're more closely on the substance use side of things, who understand those things. But if you're more in mental health world and you don't see a lot of clients who are addicted to opioids, you don't necessarily have that understanding.

[00:26:22] Jennifer Baity: And if you're only, again, required to have 15 hours of training in substance use disorders to become a therapist. You can understand why that disparity might be there. So anyway, I'm doing this training on opioid use disorder and I'm explaining that, you know, this is a thing and you could just see like light bulbs go off for people and people that were asking me questions about it and I'm like, yeah, this research says this and this research says that about it.

[00:26:45] Jennifer Baity: And that kind of thing just lights me up. 'cause I'm like, these people are now going to help their clients harder to get on that than they would've before. Thank you. Those are all really great. Both stories and examples of mental health services and treatment and the training of others. All really great stuff.

[00:27:03] Jennifer Baity: So final question to wrap up. What do you feel are some of the positive things that could come out of the pandemic and all of its subsequent meltdown on multiple fronts that could really help us in providing more mental health services to our community? Yeah. Well, you know, I think one thing, it's kind of one of those bad news, good news things.

[00:27:21] Jennifer Baity: So, you know, we've experienced the Global pandemic, which caused so many more people to have mental health symptoms. I read something recently that said that like 42% of Americans experienced symptoms of anxiety and depression as of December, 2020, which was double what it was in the year. So that's how bad it has been.

[00:27:43] Jennifer Baity: And so twice as many people now, they've either experienced those symptoms or they know someone who has. So they're friends with those people, their family members, their work colleagues, and I think people are also being more vocal about it because it's more prevalent. And they're also more, how can I say, they're more open about asking for services and asking for what they need, because it's like, Hey, it's a more universal phenomenon.

[00:28:10] Jennifer Baity: So recognizing the symptoms is one. Asking for help is another. So I think there's a little bit less. Stigma than before. There's still stigma, but a little bit less stigma than before because more people have experienced it. I think another thing is because people couldn't leave their homes and couldn't meet in person for therapy during the pandemic.

[00:28:33] Jennifer Baity: There's a wider acceptance of teletherapy, which, you know, people have been trying to roll out teletherapy in this sort of awkward way. Like, please accept teletherapy as an option, really, you'll enjoy it. And people are like, no, I'd rather go in person. But you know, the pandemic made people accept it. They had to, there was no other way.

[00:28:51] Jennifer Baity: And so once people started using it, they were like, oh. I kinda like it this way. In fact, I saw a brand new client this morning and when he found me on Psychology Today, he didn't realize at first that I only saw clients using teletherapy, and he was kinda like, oh, well I guess it's okay. But then I saw him this morning for our first real session.

[00:29:10] Jennifer Baity: He's like, oh, I wasn't sure I was gonna like it this way, but it's actually, it's fine. It's just this kind of the same as seeing somebody live. You know? It's like as long as you can communicate it, he felt that we would feel distanced, but we didn't feel distanced. So people's preconceptions about teletherapy sometimes turn out not to be true.

[00:29:29] Jennifer Baity: I'm not gonna tell you that there isn't something that's lost when you don't see people in person. There absolutely is, you know, I can't see people's entire bodies and they can't see my entire body, and you miss that little being able to shake hands with people when they come in and offer them a cup of tea.

[00:29:44] Jennifer Baity: And I'd love to do things like that. You know, when I've seen people in person, there are things that are lost. But there's also things that are game. You know, people don't have to drive an hour and a half across town and rush hour traffic to see me and just all that mess. You know, if all they can do when they're feeling really awful, when the morning is open up their laptop and click on the link to see their therapist, that's a huge game.

[00:30:08] Jennifer Baity: That's a huge game. 'cause sometimes that's all people feel like they can do. So that's, again, I think the energy devoted to treating mental health and reaching people who have mental health conditions is going to be on fire for not just this year, but for a while, because we don't know exactly how deeply this pandemic and the mental health conditions that came out of it.

[00:30:31] Jennifer Baity: We don't know how long it's gonna affect people yet we just know it has impacted people and it will be for some time, but we don't know how long. So people are gonna be in there and trying to offer services for a while on the federal level, on the state level, on the city and county level on your business.

[00:30:49] Jennifer Baity: You know, if, if you have a mental health entity, they are going to be paying closer attention to surveying everybody anonymously. How is our staff doing? You know, and those are gonna be anonymous surveys, but they're gonna be taking mental health surveys. To see how is our staff doing? Are they experiencing a lot of anxiety and depression?

[00:31:09] Jennifer Baity: What should we be doing about that? So they're gonna be paying attention. Our corporate overlords are gonna have to be paying attention because otherwise there's not gonna be staff. To staff those corporations. I think part of what we're seeing when employers are complaining about, oh, we're not able to hire people.

[00:31:27] Jennifer Baity: People don't wanna come back after the pandemic, you know, it's a lot of things, but I think partially it's mental health and I don't think there's a lot of recognition that part of it's mental health that people are making very careful decisions about which job to go back to and why. And what they can put up with, not just what they're willing to put up with, but what they are able to put up with based on how fragile their mental health is right now.

[00:31:54] Jennifer Baity: So they can't put up with what they used to put up with necessarily. It's not just that they don't want to, you know, they might have a child who's suffering from an anxiety disorder right now that they didn't last year. So I think as a country as a whole, we have to be paying attention to this. Also, mental health equity.

[00:32:12] Jennifer Baity: I think health equity is something that the country as a whole is paying closer attention to. I think we saw how poorly just writ large, the pandemic showed us. You know, more people dying, people of color, poor people, black people, Latinos, you know, people who generally have less access to healthcare. And these are also people who have less access to mental health care, who have less access to people who look like them.

[00:32:39] Jennifer Baity: We don't have language. Let's say that you speak Mandarin. Good luck finding a provider right now. You know? And you need to have a provider that speaks Mandarin. I'm sorry, but you do, and I can't do it. You know, even if I have a translator, I can't provide good services in Mandarin. It's just super awkward.

[00:32:58] Jennifer Baity: Even if I was working at the hospital and I had somebody on staff who would be providing good translation next to me, it is just not the same as having somebody who is culturally. And linguistically able to provide those services who is a licensed mental health provider, and we need to recruit and train and have all of those.

[00:33:19] Jennifer Baity: We need to do better, bottom line. So that's part of what I hope will come out of this as well. Thank you all. What are the wonderful insights? So thank you, Jennifer, for sharing both your insights into our mental health services and your own mental health practice today. We'll make sure that listeners have your contact information, website, social media, so they can follow you and get engaged and your mental health services.

[00:33:40] Jennifer Baity: Please stay safe and healthy as we all work our way through this very strange new normal. Thank you. So nice talking with you. That's it for this episode of Voices of the Community. You've been listening to the voice of Jennifer Beatty, a therapist in private practice who does training on motivational interviewing and other topics for various agencies throughout the Bay Area and beyond.

[00:34:01] Jennifer Baity: To find out more about Jennifer and the mental health services that she provides, please go to jennifer beatty.com. Jennifer had mentioned her work with Edgewood, and you can find out more about Edgewood Center for Children and Families and their work with teenagers in her interview with Justine Underhill and Greg Biggs in episode 32.

[00:34:20] Jennifer Baity: Please tune in to KSFP 1 0 2 0.5 FM to next week's show on July 8th at 8:30 AM where we share the voices of the San Francisco Radio Club about the 100 plus year old club of amateur radio enthusiast and the Bayview Opera House about their neighborhood centric support during the pandemic and how they are reopening and hosting live performances.

[00:34:43] Jennifer Baity: We hope that you enjoyed the insights, points of view and personal stories from the voices of Change makers and their nonprofits and small businesses featured in the series. To find out more and get engaged with the nonprofits, small businesses, and staff members featured in the series, please go to my website, george koster.com and click on Voices of the Community to find links to the extended versions of these interviews and to listen to the entire series.

[00:35:11] Jennifer Baity: After listening to these stories, we hope that you will consider making a donation and volunteering to provide a hand up to your fellow community members. I want to thank my associate producer Eric Estrada and Casey Nance at Citron Studios, along with the wonderful crew at the San Francisco Public Press and KSFP.

[00:35:29] Jennifer Baity: Voices of the Community is a member of Intersection for the Arts, which allows us to offer you a tax deduction. For your contributions, please go to george koster.com and click on the donate link to make a donation to help us provide future shows just like this one. While you're on our website, you can enjoy our archived Pass shows, which feature community voices working on solutions to critical issues facing Northern California communities.

[00:35:55] Jennifer Baity: And you can sign up for our newsletter to find out more about future shows as well as shows and events from the organizations that are included in our episodes. Take us along on your next COVID walk by subscribing to voices of the community. On Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

[00:36:15] Jennifer Baity: You can follow us on Twitter at George Koster and we'd love to hear from you with feedback and show ideas. So send us an email toGeorge@georgekoster.com. I'm George Koster in San Francisco, and thank you for listening.

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