TherapistAid

My first item of interest is a website called TherapistAid that provides mental health professionals with worksheets, interactive tools, guides, videos, articles, and products such as card games, books, and much more. When visiting the website, mental health professional can use filters based on demographics including children, adolescents, and adults as well as specific topics that they are looking to address. The topics that are covered with the tools provided include anger, anxiety, art therapy, CBT, communication skills, DBT, depression management, education, emotion regulation, goal setting, grief, parenting and behavior, positive psychology, relaxation, self-esteem, stress management, substance use, and values.

The way that I have been using TherapistAid at my internship with Evanston Township Highschool is for the formation of groups and the content being covered throughout group sessions. Each full time social worker and their interns are responsible for creating and facilitating a certain amount of groups during the school year. I have used both the tools available at Evanston in addition to TherapistAid to help create an online resource center for social workers to use. Social workers can go to this shared web page and look up the topic they are covering in group. Once they search for the topic and click on that folder, there will be a list of resources provided which includes worksheets, curriculums, videos, interactive games, and much more. For example, I will be cofacilitating a group that focuses on social skills for students considered high functioning who have IEP goals that indicate a focus on communication and positive socialization. By filtering the demographic and specific topic, I can use TherapistAid to pull worksheets and activities that will assist students with increasing social skills.

TherpistAid fits into providing evidence-based education, behavior, and mental health services portion of the school social work practice model. In its mission statement, TherapistAid states “it is dedicated to helping mental health professionals improve their craft by providing free evidence-based education and therapy tools. Our resources are created with clients in mind, which means avoiding jargon, and creating tools that are not only useful in theory, but in practice” (https://www.therapistaid.com/about). By using TherapistAid, social workers and other mental health professional can provide multiple examples of evidence-based practice materials that meet the clients where they are at as well as remains within a strengths based approach. These tools can also be used to monitor group and individual progress to assist in evaluating the effectiveness of services being provided to students.

Below is the link to the TherapistAid website. It is free to sign up with your email and easy to navigate. I hope this will be useful during your internship and beyond!

https://www.therapistaid.com/about

https://www.therapistaid.com/