Pelican Cove was organized to provide mental health services for low-income individuals with mental health needs. Our therapists provide open-ended psychotherapy to those who couldn’t otherwise receive such services due to financial limitations. Psychotherapy, or talk therapy, is a way to help people with a broad variety of mental health challenges and emotional difficulties. This therapeutic approach examines the root cause for certain behaviors and thought processes. Psychotherapy can help eliminate or control troubling symptoms so a person can function better, heal, and feel a sense of well-being.
Problems helped by psychotherapy include difficulties in coping with daily life stressors, the impact of trauma, medical illness, grief and loss, and specific conditions, like depression or anxiety. Psychotherapy can be short-term (a few sessions), dealing with immediate issues, or long-term (months or years), dealing with longstanding and complex issues. The goals of treatment are planned jointly by the patient and therapist, and sessions typically take place weekly.
Fast Facts
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6,000+
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-Client Fees
-Grants
-Individual Donors
-Annual Fundraisers
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-Student therapists are supported by weekly individual and group supervision at no cost.
-Pelican Cove supervisors are experts in the field and locally licensed and practicing psychotherapists.
-Students engage in a 30 day orientation period and then commit to weekly training sessions for an additional 12 months in addition to seeing their clients.
-Training program is psychodynamic and insight-oriented in nature.
-Training program includes a monthly self-care group to support therapists.
-Student therapists undergo a competitive interview process.
Clients
Our target clients are those who receive public assistance and are on Medicaid, or Medi-Cal, or persons in similar financial circumstances. These clients typically receive mental health treatment from community mental health centers that are funded by mostly public funds, such as Medi-Cal, and receive primarily time-limited and targeted treatments, commonly referred to as EBP (Evidence Based Practices). While many benefit from these treatment modalities, in our experience, those who live in high poverty, high stress, and high trauma communities are typically affected by a complex combination of factors. It is our belief that such conditions require open ended treatment, without time limitations, that focus on building safe, trusting therapeutic relationships that can then generalize to their other relationships.
Therapists
Direct service will be provided mostly by students in training from Marriage and Family Therapy, Master’s in Social Work, and Doctorate in Psychology programs in southern California. Because EBPs are so pervasive in what is arguably the largest mental health system in California, many professional education programs, especially Master’s level programs, typically focus on getting their graduates ready for these jobs. Hence, many students graduate and eventually become licensed practitioners without an opportunity to experience provision of the types of therapy that depend on the ability to foster deeper and more intimate therapeutic relationship. These therapeutic relationships then become the basis on which to understand deeply entrenched patterns and bring about changes in those patterns. It is our belief that regardless of the type of therapy a clinician eventually ends up providing, all clinicians benefit greatly from this type of training. One of Pelican Cove’s main missions is to provide exceptionally high quality supervision and training to selected trainees.