Forging Caminos

This book is your roadmap to a career as a bilingual mental health provider, with guidance on training programs, conducting research, and building your practice.
Today over 60 million Latine individuals live in the US, more than 70 percent of whom are fluent in languages besides English. Disparities in health care are significant among this population, and there is a great need for qualified mental health providers to assess, diagnose, and treat both significant and everyday mental health concerns. Yet, less than 8 percent of psychologists are Latinx, with only 5.5 percent identifying as Spanish-speaking, and current standards of training, accreditation and competence for bilingual providers is woefully unstandardized.
This book aims to chart a new path forward for bilingual mental health in the United States. Editors Maciel Campos, Yessenia Mejia, and AndrÉs J. Consoli have gathered a prestigious group of scholar-practitioners who describe the current lay of the land in bilingual mental health care, with a focus on the graduate student and early career professional who is seeking a career as a bilingual mental health provider. Chapters describe the process of identifying and navigating graduate programs with an emphasis on bilingual approaches to training and care, conducting and publishing bilingual research, internship and postdoctoral training, and building a bilingual mental health practice. The unique experiences of Black and Indigenous Latine are given particular emphasis throughout.

Maciel Campos, PsyD, is an assistant professor of clinical psychology in the Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC). She is also program director of NYC Health Hospitals/Kings County in Brooklyn, New York. She was formerly senior clinical psychologist and program director of the Home-Based Crisis Intervention program of the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of New York-Presbyterian, which provides high-quality psychiatric care to adolescents and children in Washington Heights, Inwood, West Harlem, and surrounding areas. She developed an experiential rotation for child psychiatry fellows and child psychology interns in the delivery of evidence-based treatments from a systems and cultural-humility perspective. Dr. Campos received her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Adler University in Chicago.
Yessenia Mejia, PsyD, is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and program manager at NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn. Dr. Mejia received her doctorate from the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Yeshiva University in New York. She was formerly a staff psychologist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and a postdoctoral fellow at CUIMC.
AndrÉs Consoli is a professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology at UC Santa Barbara's Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, where he serves as a member of the Advisory Committee of the Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program. Dr. Consoli was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he received a licenciatura degree in clinical psychology at the Universidad de Belgrano. He earned a masters and doctorate in counseling psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received postdoctoral training in behavioral medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University's School of Medicine. He is a visiting professor at the Universidad del Valle in Guatemala (2004-present) in their Masters and Doctoral programs and a licensed psychologist in California. He was formerly professor and associate chair of the Department of Counseling, College of Health and Social Sciences, at San Francisco State University.