Rhea Almeida

I think a lot of different things contributed to my success, but probably the most important thing was that I grew up with a disability. Growing up with a disability really inclined me to focus and be thankful for all of the different people along my path that were really helpful towards me and brought a lot of grace into my life. I realized that I needed that community of helpers along my life to really get me to where I was, and so there's a value in that that I think a lot of times people don't pay much attention to. That experience shaped my understanding of the importance of community in healing and helped me develop the work I do today.

The best career advice I received was from one of my professors in my master's program. He would read my papers and kept telling me I should publish. At that point, publishing was not even on my horizon, not even in my brain. But I think he was very influential in really dropping that idea into me that my work was sufficiently interesting that I should consider taking it to the public. That encouragement to share my work more broadly really shaped the direction of my career.

We do a lot of training with interns who come in from social work, Marriage and Family Therapy, and Counseling Psychology programs. My advice to them is to begin to interrogate what they come with from the academy, which is an over-focus on individuals and individual healing. I encourage them to begin to think about what it would mean if they connected people to their contexts and actually worked with people from more of a positive, celebratory place, rather than focusing on just the challenges and emphasizing their deficits. What we offer is not just a theoretical position - they can actually see us work in community and they can actually engage in it themselves, so it becomes real practice, not just theory.

I think the biggest challenges in our field right now are that the individual model still dominates. One of the biggest obstacles is how the academy has not really taken on the idea of healing in community. From psychiatry to social work to marriage and family therapy, the models are still very restricted to individual and sometimes family work, but they don't value community as much as they should, even though we know that communities actually serve to heal people in multiple ways. You have different programs all over the United States that are invested in community healing, but for the most part, they're driven by a very individualistic model. The system supports insurance companies that pay more for individual therapy and make group and family therapy a lesser reimbursement, which basically says there's more power in working with individuals rather than recognizing the research that shows individuals heal faster in community. It's completely counterintuitive - in hospitals, people are put into multiple groups every day because we know people build positive endorphins around other people and overcome depression faster, but then when they're discharged, they're sent back to individual therapy.

The values that are really important to me are centered on the belief that all people have the ability to thrive, and not just survive. I think most human beings and most of us have the ability to thrive and be successful and have meaningful lives. It's really important to me to focus on people celebrating their life instead of creating paths where people are harmed consistently or not allowed to see their humanity grow and get fertilized. I also believe strongly in the power of community - this culture has evolved into places where people live very alone, isolated lives, and I think this country has lost a lot of its community engagement in many ways. Restoring that sense of community is really important, especially for young kids and youth.