My name is Sandy Ahumada and I am a second-year master’s student in the Multicultural Counseling program at San Diego State University with the hopes of becoming a bilingual therapist for marginalized communities. . As a 24-year-old Latina, I am one of the youngest in my class and the first in my family to ever attend graduate school and receive a bachelor's degree from a prestigious institution. Despite going through my own mental health struggles, I have always worked hard to heal and work on my own mental health in order to best serve my clients. My journey to becoming a therapist has not been an easy one but it is something I am so passionate about that I have continued to persevere no matter the challenges Who knew that I would find my passion for counseling while participating in counseling myself at the young age of 12? I first sought a counselor on my own when I was a student at KIPP LA Prep in Boyle Heights. Although we were a charter school with only 500 students, many of us needed mental health services due to the hardships that came along with growing up in an under-resourced, predominantly immigrant community. I, for one, was seeking help after my mother had dismissed my mental health issues due to her guilt, lack of knowledge, and stigma that is deeply rooted in our Mexican culture. With only one counseling intern, there were not enough resources to attend to all of our mental health needs. Thus, the intern started a mentorship program where upperclassmen (7th and 8th graders) provided mental health support to underclassmen (5th and 6th graders) with “minor issues.” The counselor offered me a position as she learned about my listening skills, reflectiveness, and maturity through my personal counseling with her. As a young 7th grader, I was paired with a 6th-grade Latina who had just lost her dear grandma. With no training and just the skills I already had, I guided her through the grief of losing her second mom. Without knowing it, I was using skills that I later learned in official peer support training during my college years. I listened actively, validated, asked questions, used cultural competency, and offered a safe space for her to mourn. I realize how unethical this was as I could have caused more pain to my peers given my lack of training. Thankfully, I was able to aid her, and eventually, my very first “client” graduated from counseling with me. Nevertheless, my goal is to prevent situations like this from happening because mental health care should not fall on the shoulders of children. For me, a big part of being passionate about mental health and being a therapist is advocacy. Despite my own self-advocacy, I did not start seeing a therapist until high school. I knew something was wrong, but I did not know what exactly. One day, in my first year of high school, I learned about mental illness and slowly, my own life started to make sense. I decided to take matters into my own hands and seek professional help. Nevertheless, it was difficult getting my family’s support as they did not see anything wrong with me and did not believe in therapy, let alone mental illness. That is where my mental health advocacy started: with my own family. My first few years of treatment consisted of me learning everything I could about my diagnoses and therapy in order to educate my parents to garner their support. Self-advocacy is the hardest form of advocacy; therefore, advocacy for other mentally ill individuals came naturally. Initially, I used my social media to educate my followers on the misconceptions of mental illness and share my own mental health journey. This passive form of advocacy changed during the Spring of 2019, my second year of college. In February 2019, I attempted suicide as my mental health had gone untreated while in college due to a lack of adequate resources on my college campus to treat my severe diagnoses. Furthermore, despite being in therapy all of high school, I had not received trauma-informed care and had never addressed my trauma. I subsequently ended up in the psychiatric hospital for a week. During my time in the hospital, a student died of suicide. Just days later, another student died of suicide. I was enraged. I was enraged for me, for the two students who passed, and for all other students who had gone unheard. I knew my attempt and the ones of other students could have been prevented had we just accessed the proper treatment, so I made it my responsibility to make sure this never happened again. I wrote an email to the school president insisting that we needed more resources for those suffering from mental illness and offered solutions such as subsidizing insurance plans for low-income students and creating a fund to subsidize therapy. Since then both of these initiatives have been implemented and the mental health resources that are being offered at the moment have significantly expanded. Furthermore, I was one of the founding members of the Claremont Colleges Mental Health Initiative, which conducted a survey on our consortium’s counseling center in order to address the gaps in care. Thanks to our survey and the close relationship with the counseling center, there has been an expansion in BIPOC therapists, there is no longer a session cap, and referrals are emphasized for students with more severe illnesses. However, my favorite position in my mental health advocacy journey has been being the Mental Health Advisor for our student government. As an advisor, I sent out biweekly emails to our college student body about resources, de-stigmatization, and mental wellness tips. Every email, students have emailed me back expressing their gratitude and the usefulness of my emails in their own healing. Furthermore, several have reached out to ask for support in starting their own mental health journey. Thanks to those emails, talk about mental health on our campus has been normalized and students are becoming more and more comfortable asking for help. My passion to break down barriers to care has followed me since and has shaped the roles I have taken on. For instance, in January of 2019, I joined Ayana Therapy as one of its founding interns. Ayana is an organization that aims to eradicate barriers to care for BIPOC and queer individuals by matching clients with tele-therapists of the same characteristics. My developing expertise in therapy and passion for helping underserved communities allowed our start-up to become a reality, which now has on-boarded more than 200 therapists counseling marginalized clients all over the U.S. Furthermore, my vulnerability on our social media regarding my own mental health journey and recovery gained us over 15 thousand followers. Beyond the structural barriers that Ayana addresses, another obstacle that our communities face is stigma, which is why I designed a culturally sensitive stigma intervention for Latinos as a part of my Senior Thesis. The intervention would consist of a therapy consumer sharing their therapy journey as I had seen how my vulnerability inspired many others to start therapy. One day, I hope to test its efficacy by carrying out this intervention in the community so that we may all support one another in our healing processes. Today, I am a second-year graduate student attending the Community Based Block(CBB): Multicultural Counseling program at San Diego State University and working at Urban Restoration Resource Center where I serve low-income marginalized communities. Being on the other end of therapy has made me realize how much bad therapy I received, especially as a woman of color who had experienced trauma. As I have started seeing clients, I keep in mind all the things I wish I received in my own treatment from culturally competent care to trauma-informed care and I go above and beyond in providing this for clients who need it. In conclusion, I am on this journey to become a mental health therapist because I want to be that Spanish-speaking, trauma-informed, culturally competent therapist that I wish I had sooner. I want to share what I have learned during my own healing journey and I want to help others help themselves by empowering them and showing them how capable they are. In my future as a therapist, I would love to continue to serve under-resourced communities that house vulnerable populations who are susceptible to even more harm due to structural barriers that are usually at the root of many of the members’ mental health issues. These structural barriers also prevent them from getting the support they deserve, which is why I strongly believe in being an advocate for social change alongside a mental health therapist.

Who knew that I would find my passion for counseling while participating in counseling myself at the young age of 12? I first sought a counselor on my own when I was a student at KIPP LA Prep in Boyle Heights. Although we were a charter school with only 500 students, many of us needed mental health services due to the hardships that came along with growing up in an under-resourced, predominantly immigrant community. I, for one, was seeking help after my mother had dismissed my mental health issues due to her guilt, lack of knowledge, and stigma that is deeply rooted in our Mexican culture. With only one counseling intern, there were not enough resources to attend to all of our mental health needs. Thus, the intern started a mentorship program where upperclassmen (7th and 8th graders) provided mental health support to underclassmen (5th and 6th graders) with “minor issues.” The counselor offered me a position as she learned about my listening skills, reflectiveness, and maturity through my personal counseling with her. As a young 7th grader, I was paired with a 6th-grade Latina who had just lost her dear grandma. With no training and just the skills I already had, I guided her through the grief of losing her second mom. Without knowing it, I was using skills that I later learned in official peer support training during my college years. I listened actively, validated, asked questions, used cultural competency, and offered a safe space for her to mourn. I realize how unethical this was as I could have caused more pain to my peers given my lack of training. Thankfully, I was able to aid her, and eventually, my very first “patient” graduated from counseling with me. Nevertheless, my goal is to prevent situations like this from happening because mental health care should not fall on the shoulders of children. Today, I am a second-year graduate student attending the Community Based Block(CBB): Multicultural Counseling program at San Diego State University and working at Urban Restoration Resource Center where I serve low-income marginalized communities. Being on the other end of therapy has made me realize how much bad therapy I received, especially as a woman of color who had experienced trauma. As I have started seeing clients, I keep in mind all the things I wish I received in my own treatment from culturally competent care to trauma-informed care and I go above and beyond in providing this for clients who need it. In conclusion, I am on this journey to become a mental health therapist because I want to be that Spanish-speaking, trauma-informed, culturally competent therapist that I wish I had sooner. I want to share what I have learned during my own healing journey and I want to help others help themselves by empowering them and showing them how capable they are. In my future as a therapist, I would love to continue to serve under-resourced communities that house vulnerable populations who are susceptible to even more harm due to structural barriers that are usually at the root of many of the members’ mental health issues. These structural barriers also prevent them from getting the support they deserve, which is why I strongly believe in being an advocate for social change alongside a mental health therapist.