Valerie Vengerov

I graduated with my master's degree in 2022 and have been working in the mental health field since then. Right now I'm working as a mental health clinician for the criminal justice system, working with justice-impacted populations. I wanted to get in this field because I really wanted to help support women and children. Obviously, women and children are vulnerable populations, and so I wanted to kind of work with the offender population to approach the issue of violence against women and children in a different way, through the counseling of the offender. My first job was at a safe house, a domestic violence shelter, where we welcomed survivors trying to escape their situations to our undisclosed location with their children. I also worked with a population with severe mental illness at a day program, running groups and supporting psychiatric stability and reintegrating them into society. After that, I worked as a behavioral assistant with children with behavioral issues and emotional issues. I then was working as a mental health counseling expert at the county jail, providing mental health support and screening for emergency services and referrals for people that were incoming into the jail. From there, I transitioned into my forensic psychotherapy role, where I exclusively just provide therapy for people on federal supervision involved in the criminal justice system. I also work as a sex therapist, helping couples through their intimacy and communication issues, sexual dysfunction, identity, LGBTQ issues, things like that. Along the way, I've also engaged in various research opportunities. I was working as a research assistant studying brain waves for individuals with traits that correlate with psychopathy, and I'm also currently studying linguistic patterns of mass violence perpetrators through another research lab. Interestingly, COVID helped shape my journey. I was on a completely different path to bio and med school, and I was studying abroad at the time, and then COVID happened and I had to be sent home. I found myself just online looking at psychology research articles because that was what was interesting to me at the time, and I just spent all my time looking at these research articles, and I thought to myself, I should be getting paid for this. And so that's when I kind of changed into psychology and tried to make more of a career out of it, which is what led me more to the forensic field.