
PsychBytes with CCS
PsychBytes is presented by The Ohio State University, Office of Student Life Counseling and Consultation Service. We provide a wide range of information pertaining to mental health topics, commonly asked questions, available resources, and general psycho-education that centers on the college demographic. The aim is to reduce stigma around mental health, reduce barriers to treatment, normalize experiences, and educate on prevention, intervention, and resources related to emotional and mental wellbeing.
PsychBytes with CCS
OSU Couple and Family Therapy Clinic with Dr. Ashley Hicks
Psych Bytes with CCS is a weekly podcast hosted by Student Life's Counseling and Consultation Service. This show is dedicated to discussing a wide range of topics pertaining to mental health commonly experienced in the college setting. It is important to note that this podcast is not a substitute for therapy. All of the topics on this show, while discussed by professionals are strictly psycho educational, and meant to inform listeners on available resources, skills and support. Topics on this show can be sensitive in nature. And should you find yourself needing additional support or resources, please visit ccs.osu.edu or call us at 614-292-5766. With that in mind, enjoy the show.
Josh Bailey:What is up everybody, my name is Josh and this is Psych Bytes with CCS. And today we are joined by Dr. Ashley Hicks, who is an independent marriage and family therapist, who is also the director of the OSU Couple and Family Therapy Clinic, and is also a clinical associate professor in the College of Education and Human Ecology in the Human Development and Family Science program. What a mouthful, and welcome.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Thank you so much. And thank you for saying all the things.
Josh Bailey:Yes.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:I appreciate it.
Josh Bailey:Hey, if you are going to have all those accolades, we might as well celebrate them and throw them out. So.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Well, good stuff.
Josh Bailey:Yeah.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Excited to be here.
Josh Bailey:Yeah, very glad to have you here. And today, we're going to be talking about the Couple and Family Therapy
Clinic:what it is, who it serves, what you all do, and who better than to talk to the director about all these things? So let's start off with what is the Couple and Family Therapy Clinic here at OSU?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah, so the Ohio State Couple and FamilyTherapy Clinic is a behavioral service clinic. We provide mental health services to individuals, couples, families, groups, for folks in the Columbus Metropolitan area, in-person, on-campus. And also across the state of Ohio via telehealth. We also are a training clinic, I know we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But we help train up the next generation of couple and family therapists in the state.
Josh Bailey:Very cool. All right. So let's start off with just maybe some of the services you guys provide then? Because again, there's a lot of layers here that we're gonna get into. But I think the one that everybody wants to know is like, what do you do?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:What do we do? Yeah, yeah. So we are the Couple and Family Therapy Clinic, or CFT clinic for short. And we provide therapy, mental health therapy, and we provide it to individuals. So yes, we can see individuals. That's a huge question. I get it, because the name is "Couple and Families."
Josh Bailey:Yeah, if it's not in the title, can you?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah, that's a question we get a lot and I get it. And so yes, we provide therapy to individuals. And that's everyone from children all the way up into adults. We also provide couples therapy, and there's a couple of different formats for that. So we provide sort of ongoing couples therapy for folks who are having issues with their relationship or want to improve things. We provide pre-marital therapy for folks who are either getting married or preparing to enter into like a long term committed relationship. And then we also provide what's called"discernment counseling." And so that's for folks who are married and are trying to decide, "Okay, do we want to stay married? Do we want to invest? You know, six months or so in couples therapy? Do we want to get a divorce?" And so discernment counseling is all about giving them sort of a brief, structured approach to making a decision about, "Okay, are we going to keep things exactly as they are? Are we going to decide to invest six months in couples therapy? Or are we going to opt for what we like to call a good divorce and figure out how we can kind of end our relationship amicably?"
Josh Bailey:Gotcha. A good divorce, not something we often hear in the general speak.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah. You know, ending relationships, whether you're married or not, is difficult and comes with a lot. But we think there are ways that you can do it well, and it doesn't have to be as harmful or as hurtful. So when we're working with folks, if that's the direction they want to go, we try to help them make the choices that work best for them.
Josh Bailey:Good. Sounds invaluable.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah.
Josh Bailey:Very much so.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah.
Josh Bailey:So you're pointing out that you work with children. So I guess this means that you guys are not exclusive to OSU students only?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:No, we are not. So we provide therapy to folks across the state of Ohio. So the only thing you need to do is be a person living physically in the state of Ohio, and we can see you in-person on our campus location, or we can see you via telehealth. We do see a lot of OSU students, undergrad and grad students. There is a discount for OSU students. So we'll talk about fees and costs later. And even a discount for OSU staff and faculty. But yeah, you don't have to be affiliated with OSU in anyway to get services from us.
Josh Bailey:Awesome. Open to everybody, as long as you're in Ohio. So you did note fees and cost. So I'm curious like, and that's I think what everybody wants to know, is like, if I'm going to have services anywhere, what do I have to pay? What's that look like?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah. So we operate from a standard rate and a sliding fee scale.
Josh Bailey:Okay.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:So our standard rate is $100 per hour, if you can afford it. That's what we ask. And it's pretty comparable to folks who are paying for mental health therapy out in the world in our area. And— but we don't think that you shouldn't be able to get mental health services if you can't afford that, right? So we have a sliding fee scale, it ranges from zero to $100 per session. So that kind of top rate.
Josh Bailey:Yeah.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:And it's really based on income and number of folks in the house. But we take your word for it. So we're not asking you to provide proof of income. We're not asking you to provide, you know, like pay stubs or saying like,"Hey, how much do you make a month or a year? How many people live in your house? This is the fee we would charge, does that work for you?" For OSU undergrad students, their flat rate is$20, unless that is prohibitive, and we could talk about maybe a reduced rate. And then we offer a $25 intake session fee for every new client. So we want to give you a chance to come in, have an initial session. See if you feel like it's a good fit. I know it could take more than one session to figure that out.
Josh Bailey:Definitely.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:But we say like, instead of having to pay that $400 fee or some other fee, pay $25, which is comparable to maybe an insurance copay.
Josh Bailey:Yeah.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Come check us out, and then if you want to continue, this is the rate that you would pay. And then we have some exceptions to that. So we do have some times where folks don't pay anything, we just charge them zero. We don't charge folks who are undocumented, we don't charge folks who are unemployed, and we don't charge folks who are on disability.
Josh Bailey:Okay, so you— sounds like you guys do whatever you can to make sure people have access to the services, regardless of financial situation. All right.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Exactly.
Josh Bailey:Very good to know. And very important. So I talk with people about that a lot, just in general, because, again, we're in college. And money is scarce, when you're a college student, for the most part. So knowing that, hey, if I'm a student here, I can pay 20 bucks, get a session, or if I can't afford the 20 bucks, you guys will work with me. And I can still get services.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah. And that fee for students, particularly for undergrads, is $20, whether you're coming in for individual therapy, if you're coming in for couples with your partner, if you're coming in for family therapy. So maybe you're bringing in a sibling, or a parent or another loved one that you want to spend some time working out some stuff with. We try to make it accessible, regardless of the type of service that you're seeking. And then for our grad students, we, we don't charge them the $20 fee, we base it on their income and the number of folks in the house. But sometimes we hear from grad students like, "Oh, this still is a little bit too, like prohibitive for me." And so we like to tell them, like, let us know. So our goal is not to keep you— to like be a gatekeeper. Like, if you're like, "Oh, I can't really pay$50." Like, let us know, we'll agree upon a rate, and then that's your rate. So we again, don't want any of our students, undergrad or grad, to feel like cost is gonna keep me from seeking help.
Josh Bailey:That's awesome. Awesome. So getting back at the services that you guys offer. So you've listed out individual, you've listed out couple, you've listed out therapy. Do you guys do any type of like group work or anything like that?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah, so we do offer groups. And we've offered a couple of different groups over maybe the last, I'd say three to five year period. And we have a couple coming up in the Fall. So we offer group— our most recent group offering last spring was dealing with grief and loss. And so it was open to adults, again, across the state. We actually did it virtually. And it's all about kind of understanding how grief impacts you mentally, emotionally, physically, and how do we cope with it? And really trying to get a sense of like, there's really no time limit for grief. So really wanting to make that open and available. We also offer a group called Managing your Mental Health. And so it's like a skill based group, like how do we cope? We talk a lot about skills you might learn from like Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, so that we can kind of manage some of the distress we might feel for folks who might experience anxiety, depression, or just generally mood concerns. We have a Healthy Relationships group that we offer, that is all about what a healthy relationship looks like. It's really targeted towards young adults. So it'd be great for OSU students, if you're like, "Hey, I'm in my first relationship, or maybe I've been in a few, but like, it's not really working out for me. And I'm just trying to see what's going on." It's really targeted toward kind of saying, like, what kind of relationship do I want? What what behaviors do I want to see? What things should be red flags? And then when we have capacity, we offer a premarital group. So we offer pre marital therapy for folks. And sometimes we do it one-on-one with couples. So they meet with a therapist one-on-one. Other times, we offer it in a group format. So multiple couples will meet with a therapist, or several therapists, to work through that curriculum. And then we offer an LGBTQ+ support group for individuals in their loved ones, who maybe just want to talk about issues or concerns they have regarding sexuality or gender in a safe space.
Josh Bailey:That's awesome. Okay, so it seems like a fairly, fully encompassing, you know, offering that you guys have there. So what can prospective clients or active clients expect if they come in for any one of these services?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah, I think the first thing they can expect is sort of a welcoming atmosphere. So we want clients to feel comfortable. If you're coming into our campus location over on West Campus, you're going to walk into the waiting room— It's a typical waiting room, there's magazines, there's a beverage station. You know, you kind of hang out until your clinician comes out to get you. And then you're going to be introduced to our clinic and kind of our policies and procedures. I think the big thing to know is we're training clinic. So what that means is that our clinicians, or at least the bulk of our clinicians, are students. They're graduate students, either in our Master's in Couple andFamily Therapy program, or our PhD or Doctorate program in Couple and Family Therapy. So they're either going to have like an MFT trainee license in the state, and— excuse me, an MFT trainee designation in the state, I'll be clear, they're not licensed yet. Or if they're Doc student, they may be licensed at that first level in the state of Ohio. And so, what that means is that because they're in training, we record all of our sessions. We have a recording system, it's pretty non-invasive, in each of our therapy rooms. But we do record the video, we do review it with students for their training purposes. And you might also meet some of our supervisors, some of our faculty, when we're observing students sessions live. We give our clients the opportunity to connect with our supervisors, so that you're not confused about who's watching you. We try to be transparent. We give the option of like, you can meet our team, or you can not. So some folks opt in, like"Yeah, I want to meet them." Other folks are like, "Keep it a secret. I don't want to know," and that's fine, too. And we don't watch every session, but because we're training our students, we do have to record every session. So I think that's a big thing for folks to know around what to expect, as you're gonna come in, you're gonna be in a room, you're good. If you look in the corners, you see a camera and a mic, and you kind of— being at our clinic and and agreeing to be seen at our clinic means you're kind of signing up for that.
Josh Bailey:Yeah. Okay. And we do a similar thing here, with CCS, right? We're also a training facility. So I know a lot of our clients are very aware. And you know, it's good to just have that information out because, yeah.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah, we just don't want folks to be surprised. And I think the biggest thing we always say is
like:It really is about the clinicians in training. It's not really about the clients. And everything's going to be kept confidential. We're not sharing anything, we're not sharing your video information with anyone else. And we delete them every 90 days. So essentially, every semester, those previous videos get, get wiped, and so.
Josh Bailey:So even then, time limited, then gone.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yep.
Josh Bailey:All right. So that's what a client could expect. And I'm curious, what do, what do people come in for? Right? Because, again, when I look at the title "Couple and Family Therapy," I'm like, oh, it's for couples and relationships only. But yeah, you were highlighting before, individuals are coming in. So what do people come in for?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah, so of course, people come in for couples therapy. The biggest presenting concern that folks name is communication, we want to learn how to communicate better. We always say that can mean 100 different things, because it's about that specific relationship, those specific people. So we get pretty curious about what's going on there.
Josh Bailey:Yeah.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:We have families come in, right. And that could be anything from parents with young children or adolescents to, we have young adults bringing their adult family members, siblings, parents in as well. So sometimes we get students bringing in their siblings and saying, like,"Hey, I really want to talk about this. I want to talk about how we grew up. I want to talk to my parent about this difficult thing we haven't been able to talk about before." So I would like to let students know that's like an option, if you're like, "Hey, I really want to connect with my family in a new way." And then we get individuals, and they come in
for everything. So things like:anxiety, depression, school stress, time management, being homesick, right? Moving maybe to a new state, not sure how to manage it. Conflict with friends and family. We kind of see a little bit of everything. And so, you know, we're pretty open to that. We say we provide kind of general outpatient therapy. Of course, there are some things that maybe aren't appropriate for us. Like if we need to give you a higher level of care, maybe you're in such significant distress, maybe you need like an intensive outpatient program, where you're seen more than once a week. And so we are happy to make referrals for that. But we typically see folks weekly, maybe every two weeks, and they're coming in to talk about kind of what's going on for them. We even have folks come in, I think this last semester, several folks are just like,"It's time, I want to kind of explore my sense of self." We could do that with you if you want. So, yeah, lots of different reasons folks come in.
Josh Bailey:That's really, really cool. And looking at it
more on the student level:I'm curious, like, looking to the"couple and family" aspect of things, are there any common themes that you see with students here?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah. Yeah. So with students, when they're
Josh Bailey:Yeah. I can imagine so. And you pointed out the one coming in at the individual level, we're also often thinking about those things like school stress, work, stress, anxiety, depression, maybe there's a recent shift in mental health or well being, and they're trying to navigate that, and they've never experienced it before. For students in couple relationships, it's often trying to navigate what does it mean to be coupled or partnered? How do we have healthy dynamics? What's too much time together? What's not enough time? Is it okay if my partner wants me to only do things with them? Or, how do I expand my network? What if my family doesn't know about my partner or like my partner? How do we navigate those things? And then I think for some of our students, undergrad, but also grad students, it's what do we do next? Like, we're both students, and we're figuring out our lives. Where do we want to be together? How do we make decisions? How do we compromise? And many times it's also the same issues we see with non-student couples, right? Like, how do we communicate? How do we share our emotions effectively? You know, we're couple/family therapists by training, that means we're looking at the big picture. Like what relationships you have, who you're connected to, how does your family influence you? So we're gonna ask those questions. And oftentimes, what we find is like, couples are sort of, sometimes, carrying out patterns they learned from how they grew up, and where they grew up. And then they're trying to bring in one, two or multiple people together and figure out "okay, what does it look like when we both are doing that?" And so, with some of our students in relationships, we're often thinking about, "Oh, it makes sense that you learn how to show up this way, because you grew up this way. Or you, you lived in this area, but your partner didn't." And so now, y'all are trying to figure out what it looks like together. But those are some really fun conversations. like, particularly maybe with an undergraduate, as: we are figuring out our lives, and now we're together, and what if we have different post-graduation ideas? And maybe I want to go to grad school, and it's going to take me somewhere to the West Coast, and you want to go into industry, and it's going to keep you over here on this side of town. What do we do? Where do we go? How's this work? Can we stay together? What's long distance?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yes, exactly. And we tell folks, you know, we do traditional couples. We ask people to opt in for, you know, two, three months, sometimes six months, depending on what your concern is. But we also offer what we call "One-at-a-Time" sessions, or "OAT" sessions. And so, the issue like, "Hey, we're trying to figure out what we want to do post-graduation," might be a good single session option for folks. Like, "Hey, we're coming in, we're going to take 90 minutes, the presenting concern is like, we are trying to figure out if we wanted to make long distance work. What would that need to look like?" And it's really like solution-based and focused on coming to potential solutions for what works well for you. And we offer those single sessions in like, up to five session format. So you could come once, maybe you come again, the next week, and you're like, "Okay, I think we're okay." A month from now, "Hey, we came twice before, we want to kind of follow up." So it's kind of like a check-in, and really like, you can have it once, you can do it up to five times. And it doesn't have to be like a "traditional" couple session, where you're, you know, investing months and months to figure out something. Particularly if it's an issue, like: What are we going to do after graduation? I had a recent breakup. We're trying to— we're moving in together, or we're trying to figure out our budget. Stuff like that. So I always tell folks like, if you don't have as much time as maybe you think you have to commit to traditional therapy, whatever you think that means, we do offer these like single session options that might be really good, especially for students in transition.
Josh Bailey:Awesome. All right, you guys have all these bases covered. I like this, right? What else do you guys have going on? So you're a training facility. You see, and are able to see, it seems like almost anyone and everyone. Are there any other things, are there any other opportunities that people can can consider?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah. So you know, we have our service provision. We also have what we call our OSU CFT Clinic Undergraduate Internship program. And we're launching it this Fall. So it's sort of a hybrid between like a clinic assistant position, where you work with our administrative
team to do things like:answer the phones, schedule clients, complete intakes, work with our clinical team around day to day operations. And then there's also this component around getting to know what it looks like to be a mental health provider, a couple/family therapist. So you get to participate in our evening group practicum, observe sessions with a faculty supervisor, ask questions. So it's sort of a hybrid between like, an administrative assistant position, and like an explorative internship where you're trying to figure out,"Maybe I want to do this therapy thing in the future." And so we're rolling that out this Fall. We're actually doing interviews right now, so if folks are interested, I can share that info. We can post it wherever. But it's a really great opportunity for folks. And it is paid, so it's a federal work study position, but it also counts as like an internship position for like a social science class, a psychology field practicum, those kinds of things. So if students are interested, and they need opportunities like that, that's also a way they could get connected with us.
Josh Bailey:Very cool. You and I were talking earlier, you had mentioned research opportunities.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah.
Josh Bailey:Let's talk about that.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:So we are typically always conducting research at our clinic. We have options for clients to opt into that if they want to, they fill out certain surveys and things. And that's kind of fun. So there are always those options available for clients. If students were coming in as a client, they could opt in. For our undergraduate interns, there are also options for you to work on our research team, and work with some of that data, do some data analysis, or exploration, or data entry. And then we typically are kind of open to new opportunities around research as well. So if students are particularly interested in the idea of family therapy, or a couples therapy, and they want to learn more, our faculty is doing research. We have data collected at the clinic. So sometimes there's options for undergraduate students to come alongside and maybe they want to do like an honors thesis, or research thesis ,or a capstone project. They could kind of connect with our team and see if it's possible to maybe use some of our data to do that, too.
Josh Bailey:Okay. Have there been any, like, recent or just some highlights in research that you guys have done that stand out?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah, now I'm like, I should have prepared better for this question. I'm thinking— we always are doing research on "therapeutic alliance." And so the relationship between the therapist and the client, and the impact that has on therapy outcomes. How do clients feel about their process? And how, how effective is therapy for them? So we have had some research that shows that like therapeutic alliance definitely predicts better outcomes, and like, clinicians, or clients, excuse me, feel more positively about that for individual therapy. And so we've been collecting data, or trying at least to now, to get that same data for couples and families. And kind of the preliminary data says there may be a connection, but we're kind of figuring it out, get those numbers up to see.
Josh Bailey:Okay.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:And then we're also just thinking about— there's a study actively going on right now around cultural humility. So the idea of like, how much— how does the perception of a client of how culturally humble their therapist is impact the clients' experience? And vice versa. How much is the therapist perception of their own cultural humility impact the clients' experience? So we're trying to get at like— Okay, some important things, like relationship between the therapist and the client, and then this idea of cultural humility and being open to working with diverse folks. Like, how much is that impacting what clients experience? So those are a couple things. And then, it's just escaping me. I know, there's several, like, if we go to our website, I could pull up the list of all the different outcomes. But it's just escaping me or I'm losing it right now.
Josh Bailey:I guess my next question is, like, if I was a student, I'm listening to this, and I'm like, "Oh, I'm interested in that." How would I participate?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah. Yeah, I think the biggest— the first thing, if
Josh Bailey:In this research. they want to participate in the study is: you do have to be a client at our clinic. So if you're in interested in getting services, you get an opportunity to opt in to research. You can kind of do that anytime, but we ask you at intake, because that's a great time to get you to fill out papers, paperwork. Definitely.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:So if they're like, "Hey, yeah, maybe I need some support. But also, I'm just, you know, I like doing/participating in research," That'd be a great way. If you're a student, and you're wanting to learn about like, opportunities to help with the active research process, you can email our clinic at cftclinic@osu.edu. You could go to our website and click on research and learn more about the active studies we're doing. There's opportunities to kind of click and participate, or say like, "Hey, I want to be on the team." And so there's lots of ways that could connect to kind of to reach out to say, like, "I want to be a client and do research," or, "I want to be a researcher. And I want to connect with the research team."
Josh Bailey:That is so cool. Very, very cool. Yeah. Anything else then that you would want folks to know about? Or you think would be highlight worthy right now?
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah. Well, I'll say a couple things. First,
Josh Bailey:Yeah.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:That's an option. I think the other thing we are launching, not launching, but we're gonna re-up our two groups in the Fall, starting in September. So our Managing Your Mental Health group and Dealing with Grief and Loss group are rolling out that first week of September, for eight weeks. And so folks can opt in. And if that's something you're interested in, I think group therapy is a great way of like, putting your toe in the water without, like, having to be like, "I'm gonna go by myself, to have my one on one therapy experience." is like, as a clinic myself, and our other clinical staff, we are available. So if folks are like,"Hey, it might be helpful to have someone come out and talk about this issue, or that concern." Maybe we— in our, you know, our student organization, or in our dorm, we want to talk about healthy relationships. Or, you know, what would it look like to do an hour long group or presentation? We've done that, we've done that with colleges, and like student groups, we've done that in classroom spaces. So we're really open to that, too. And it really gives us, myself, but also our clinicians, opportunities to get out on campus to meet with folks where they're at. So like, we're on West Campus, we'd love you to come visit us. But we also know like, West Campus is kind of out the way from Central Campus. So we're happy to come to where the folks are. And if there are ways that we can be supportive, whether it's providing psychoeducation about a mental health concern, or a relational concern. If folks are like,"Hey, we're doing this event, and we would love to have somebody there for 30 minutes to just be a listening ear or talk to folks," we often do that. We— and we've done that beyond OSU into the Columbus community several times as well. So we just try to be a good resource. The other thing is, if you're looking for services, and you're, maybe you're not connected with CCS, maybe you were, but then maybe there was a time limit, you reach out to us and maybe you're like, "Oh, I don't know if this works." We also just like to be a referral resource. So if you're like, "I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do. I don't know if I want to be a client there." But you can call us or reach out to us, we will always try to connect you with the folks we know, and the resources, the organizations we're connected to, to try to get you the services you need.
Josh Bailey:Awesome. Dr. Ashley Hicks, thank you so very much for joining us today.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Thank you so much for having me. It's been so fun. It's so great to meet you.
Josh Bailey:You as well.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah, I'm glad we got this time.
Josh Bailey:Yeah. And hopefully we can work together again.
Dr. Ashley Hicks:Yeah.
Josh Bailey:Very soon if possible. So to our listeners, thank you as always for joining in. Stay tuned for our next episode. Take care of yourselves. Until then, I'm Josh and this is Psych Bytes with CCS.