"Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”-Martin Luther King Jr. |
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Dr. Shadeiyah was born in South Central Los Angeles in Vermont Square area. She grew up around gangs and violence. At an early age, she started losing friends to gang violence and incarceration. This is what led her to work with this population. She's had the opportunity to work in forensic mental health as a forensic program lead. She has worked in the Co-Occurring Disorder Court, Men's Central Jail, and Twin Towers.
Dr. Shadeiyah realized that she needed more than personal and work experience to assist this population. She began research in her masters program and continued to study it in her doctorate program. Her dissertation was titled "A Client-Centered Approach to Train Mental Health Providers to Work with Gang-Involved Individuals," where she focused on high-risk youth. She found there were a moderately small amount of youth that made up United States population, but some of these youth were at extreme high risk. They faced early pregnancy, substance abuse, homelessness, employment issues, and involvement with the criminal justice system. Dr. Shadeiyah found that Carl Roger’s client-centered approach would work well when dealing with gang-involved individuals. Carl Roger’s “Integral Model in the Counseling Process” became the theoretical framework for her study. Integral empathy contributes to developing a therapeutic relationship, understanding a client, and informing treatment strategies and interventions. With a focus on emphatically understanding a client over the course of the counseling process, it is possible to view empathy from a broader perspective as a common ground among mental health professionals.. Dr. Shadeiyah realized the area of gang intervention and prevention was steadily growing, but there was a gap in knowledge with those in the mental health field. Since majority of the programs assisting this demographic occur in community mental health agencies or within social services, it was important that mental health providers were trained on the gang experience. She hypothesized there would be an increase in level of empathy after training about gang-involved individuals among mental health providers. The study provided empirical support for the theorized relationship between empathy, key mental health providers training and development outcomes. Despite the limitations, the results of the study were supportive of the hypothesis that mental health provider’s level of empathy would increase after training. Dr. Shadeiyah has 18+ years of experience in the mental health field. She attended California State University, Long Beach where she majored in Criminal Justice and minored in Black Studies. She then went to collect her M.A. in Applied Forensic Psychology and Doctor of Psychology in Clinical & Forensic Psychology from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. |
