Student Ideas Matter

by By Kate Madden Yee | September 15, 2015

Counseling students design program to help older adults

Students at Saint Mary’s contribute to their fields even before graduation. Last spring, Kimberly Burks, Michelle Hider, and Vanessa Touset of the Kalmanovitz School of Education designed a program to treat older adults struggling with alcohol abuse for the Community Mental Health and Trauma Interventions course’s final project.

Their work paid off. With help from Professor Steven Blum, they pitched the idea to Contra Costa County Health Services. The county was so impressed that it will implement it later this year as a $1 million, four-year pilot study that will employ two full-time staff members and three interns.

“Just because we’re students does not mean we don’t have new ideas to contribute to the field of mental health,” Hider said. “We wanted to create a program that could actually be implemented.” The program is structured to serve up to 12 participants referred by their primary care doctors, the county’s psychiatric emergency services, or its Older Adult Mental Health program. The students’ proposal fit with the goals of California’s Mental Health Services Act of 2004—which offers care to marginalized communities—as well as the culture of Saint Mary’s, Blum said.

“They did the legwork they needed to do to research mental health needs in the county, and came up with a great idea,” he said. “This project is a remarkable expression of Saint Mary’s mission to equip students to engage the world beyond campus.”