President's Remarks
by Kellen Grayson, PsyD
COMMUNITY SERVICE AWARD
The NCSPP Community Service Award is an annual award presented for outstanding community service by an individual or a mental health organization in the field of psychoanalytic psychology. Here at NCSPP we understand the importance of mental health care that integrates psychoanalytic practice with community mental health. This year, we are pleased to announce award recipient UCSF/SFGH Infant Parent Program (IPP), with warm congratulations to IPP Director Kadija Johnston, LCSW, and Director of Training Maria St. John, PhD, MFT. IPP has a longstanding history of commitment to community mental health.
The following statement from UCSF/SFGH describes the program in detail:
IPP's mission is carried out through its offerings of diversity-informed services to a multicultural population of infants, young children, families and professionals in the San Francisco area. Simultaneously, IPP offers to psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and MFT interns, an intensive, practice-based training program in Multicultural Infant/Parent Mental Health, based on psychoanalytically informed understandings of development and of the intergenerational repercussions and transmissions of trauma, as well as the intricacies of societal injustices that impede access to mental health services by populations severely in need of them.
Selma Fraiberg organized and became the director of IPP in 1979. The theoretical model that guides the work of IPP is based on ideas she developed in her paper "Ghosts in the Nursery", in which parents have unremembered "ghosts" from their childhood experiences that influence their ability to form loving and supportive attachment relationships with their infants. The goal is to use the therapeutic relationship to help parents remember these ghosts and become aware of their impact on the caregiving relationship and hopefully interrupt the intergenerational transmission of trauma.
IPP's director, Kadija Johnston and Director of Training Maria St. John, have creatively expanded this foundational approach to include diversity-informed assessment, prenatal care in the high-risk OB/GYN clinic at SFGH, therapeutic shadowing, and consultation to early childhood programs. Kadija Johnston started the Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation program in 1987, which now provides consultation to over 40 community programs in San Francisco, including not only early care and education programs but also domestic violence and homeless shelters, Family Resource Centers, residential substance abuse treatment programs and hospital and community-based medical providers.
In addition to coordinating and supervising the training program, Maria St. John has presented and published on topics related to race, class, gender and sexuality in infant mental health work. Maria created the Parent-Child Relationship Competencies (PCRC's; St. John, 2010), recently published in the journal Zero to Three (2016), which are a set of bi-directional relational capacities that provide a map for assessment and treatment planning. Maria is also a foundational member of a collaborative group that publishes and trains on the Diversity Informed Infant Mental Health Tenets. These tenets are guiding principles outlining standards of practice in the field that address some of the racial, ethnic, socioeconomic and other inequalities embedded in society.
Congratulations again to the UCSF/SFGH Infant and Parent Program for being awarded the NCSPP Community Service Award. It is well deserved and we look forward to seeing your ongoing work within the community.