Clinical Mental Health Counseling: Trauma Studies

Susan Gere, Professor and Interim Co-Chair of the Counseling and Psychology department, is Core Faculty and a clinician and consultant in the community. Dr. Gere’s research and teaching interests are in integrative approaches to trauma treatment; understanding the impact of adverse life experience on adult learning; and mental health consultation in clinical, educational, organizational, and community settings. “I am interested in the many ways in which psychosocial knowledge can inform our understanding of educational processes across settings.”

Sue’s teaching, writing, and research interests are in developmental and relational psychology, including adult development, cultural psychology, gender issues and women’s psychology, identity and relational development, LGBTQ+ career and identity development, and career counseling and vocational development.

Research interests include feminist, relational psychology, identity development, career development and life/career transitions, specifically transgender and nonbinary adults’ career decision-making, and qualitative, constructivist and narrative research.

Dr. Joe Mageary is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in the state of Massachusetts, an experienced educator, an active musician, and a proud Lesley alum.

He has served as the Department Chair and Director of Field Training of the Counseling and Psychology Department.

Joe has held a variety of positions in the field including Director of Emergency Services and Jail Diversion for an eighteen-town catchment area and Director of Clinical Services in a therapeutic high school setting. He has used his LMHC and Lesley education in inpatient, outpatient, and community-based clinical roles.

Throughout his career, Joe's clinical work has been rooted in efforts to decrease stigma associated with chronic mental illness through providing community-based, collaborative, and recovery-oriented services. His clinical approach is influenced by tenets of Narrative Therapy, trauma-informed approaches, critical psychology, and brief therapies as well as by transdisciplinary thinkers such as Gregory Bateson and Edgar Morin.

He holds a certificate from the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma’s Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery program and is working with Voces Arts and Healing, a group of expressive therapists, clinicians and advocates supporting asylum seekers and their allies in the Juarez, Mexico/El Paso, Texas metropolitan area.

Joe has published and presented on topics ranging from the transformative potential of social justice-oriented hardcore punk rock culture to the role that technology plays in working with teens. He led a team that developed the Visual Reflection Team model: an arts-based version of the Reflecting Team technique used in Family Systems- and Narrative therapies.

In addition to having his LMHC, Dr. Joe Mageary is a:

• Nationally Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselor (CCMHC)
• Licensed School Adjustment Counselor and Special Education Administrator in the state of Massachusetts
• Level one- and two-trained Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) clinician
• Member of  the American Counseling Association (Massachusetts and Rhode Island Association for Counselor Education and Supervision Division) and the Massachusetts Mental Health Counselors Association

Rakhshanda’s scholarship and pedagogy is informed by a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective with a focus on the impact of structural and systemic violence. Her philosophical frameworks are embedded in decolonial, liberatory, and the emancipatory consciousness and the potential of grassroots and community-engaged movements. She is invested in solidarity organizing aimed at dismantling oppressive sociopolitical structural determinants of harm to individual and communal wellbeing and radical reimagining of alternatives to neoliberal and depoliticized theoretical models and wellness industry.  

Examples of her most recent scholarship include understanding issues facing disenfranchised migrant communities and learning about solidarity from the perspectives of impacted community members, activist, and organizers, exploring structural violence and its impact on “undocumented” Latinos (as) immigrants, Muslims (immigrants and non-immigrants), and LGBTQIA+ persons who have experienced incarceration, and identifying pre and post migration factors impacting the wellbeing of South Asian immigrant women.  Another area of interest and a developing project is exploring the trajectory of individuals involved in grassroot movements and community organizing in solidarity and resistance to systemic and structural violence to further understand consciousness raising and change occurs at an individual level.  

Rakhshanda is a licensed psychologist and a clinical neuropsychologist. Her work as a Harvard Medical School clinical instructor included assessment and clinical care for patients with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds needing linguistic and culture specific assessment and care.

Donna Marie San Antonio has worked as a community organizer, teacher in grades 7-12, school counselor, outdoor educator-counselor, nonprofit administrator, and university instructor. She came to Lesley University in 2011 after teaching for 8 years in the Risk and Prevention Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For 26 years, she directed the Appalachian Mountain Teen Project, an activity-based counseling program that she founded in 1984 to serve low-income and struggling youth in central and northern New Hampshire. 

Dr. San Antonio’s research and practice focus on understanding and supporting social, emotional, and physical wellness during adolescence and emerging adulthood. She has published on topics including developmental transitions for rural adolescents and emerging adults; the influence of social class and trauma in life course design and aspiration; experiential education/adventure-based counseling; school-based and workplace mentoring; school climate and social-emotional development; cross-role and cross-institutional collaboration; and community and school-based participatory action research for social change. Her current research projects include an exploration into the lifelong impact of therapeutic adventure activities during adolescence, and an auto-ethnography on how schools and communities in low-income rural areas support the social integration and well-being of migrant youth and families.  

Dr. San Antonio collaborates with international practitioners and researchers on urgent issues in school and community counseling. She frequently consults with school and community programs seeking to address cultural and economic barriers to success. She serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Experiential Education and is a Founding Member of the International Society of Policy, Research and Evaluation in School Counseling. She coordinates Lesley University’s affiliation with the UNESCO-UNITWIN Project on Lifelong Career. 

About her on-going community work, Dr. San Antonio says, "I believe in involving youth as active participants in addressing issues that threaten their well-being, such as poverty, racism, trauma, sexism, and homophobia.” As a classroom instructor and community activist, Dr. San Antonio works to create contexts that offer a high level of active critical reflection and dialogue. She enjoys hiking, biking, canoeing, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing.   

Peiwei is an Associate Professor of Counseling & Psychology, the Director for the PhD program in Counseling & Psychology, and a member of the Executive Board of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP). Her cross-cultural experiences as an immigrant in the U.S. and as a Chinese woman growing up in the late socialist/emerging capitalist era in China have shaped her genuine interest in understanding the intersection of culture, race, gender and class. She is particularly intrigued by the complex power relations of marginalization and dominance that perpetuate and reproduce social and systemic pathologies and inequalities. This also fuels her passion to create conditions for consciousness raising and collective participatory actions toward a better world.

As a teacher, Peiwei’s pedagogy has been shaped by critical and feminist theories that foreground relationship, dialogue, reflection and love. She strives to create openness, trust and authenticity in the classroom that enables critical thinking, dialogues, self-reflection, emotional exploration, and the inclusion of marginalized voices. As a trained counseling psychologist and a research methodologist, Peiwei’s scholarship explores the borderland of critical psychology and critical qualitative methodologies, pertaining to self and identity development, consciousness raising, recognition, and the emancipatory aspect of knowledge. Her most recent critical ethnographic study focuses on the conditions and process of critical consciousness raising during diversity/social justice education.

In addition, Peiwei investigates graduate students’ conception and experiences with research methodology classes, and develops teaching pedagogies that holistically center students’ identities in learning. Peiwei is also passionate about critiquing and reconstructing current code of research ethics to make it more inclusive of historically marginalized and indigenous perspectives, and better attend to layered power relations in knowledge production and dissemination. Inspired by Zen practices, Peiwei is also drawn to the intersection of Eastern spiritual traditions such as Zen Buddhism, and psychotherapy and healing.

Liz Barragato, MA, LMHC, has been an adjunct faculty member at Lesley University since 2014 and is thrilled to be a member of the core faculty starting in the 2021-2022 academic year. Liz has a private counseling and consultation practice in Cambridge, MA, and Liz is also a managing co-owner of Crooked Tree Counseling, LLC, in Cambridge.

Being a masters-level instructor, instead of having areas of scholarship, Liz had areas of clinical interest. Liz is interested in holistic theories and counseling methods, with a special interest in the intersection of Eastern wisdom practices, mental health, and wellness.

Liz brings this interest to the coordination of the Holistic Studies Specialization in the Counseling and Psychology Department. Liz is also deeply influenced by existential and relational psychoanalytic counseling approaches. Through all of these theoretical lenses, Liz see critical theory and issues of social justice permeating the work of counseling and teaching.