The Meltzer Center on GW’s Foggy Bottom campus offers clinical services to adults, children and families in the Washington, DC area. All of our services are designed to be culturally sensitive and compassionate for all clients and to reflect high standards of professional ethics and competence. The center’s therapists and supervisors represent a range of skills and interests, and whenever possible will be matched to meet a client’s needs.
The center is also a training clinic for students in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences Clinical Psychology PhD program. Doctoral student clinicians are supervised by adjunct and full-time members of the clinical psychology faculty, all of whom are licensed clinical psychologists.
Malcolm L. Meltzer served as chair of the GW Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and director of the clinical psychology PhD program in the late 1960s and 70s. His clinical interests were wide-ranging, but his true loves were community mental health and assessment. Today, the Meltzer Center honors his skills as an educator, researcher and clinician.
Aided by public health service funds for graduate training and federal financing for both education and community mental health centers in the 1960s and 70s, Meltzer and the GW clinical faculty placed clinical psychology PhD students throughout the then-neglected Washington, D.C., public school system, community mental health centers, St. Elizabeth's Hospital and at the District of Columbia General Hospital.
Meltzer knew many elementary school principals in the city and worked with them to employ graduate students to develop creative intervention programs for at-risk students. He also helped craft one of the earliest (and still one of the most comprehensive) mental health statutes in the country, the D.C. Mental Health Information Act of 1978.
Under Meltzer’s guidance, the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences launched a generation of research-trained clinical PhDs across the country. The Meltzer Center carries on his mission of education, research and service, with special attention to underserved residents of the Washington, D.C., community.
Our training clinic is run by doctoral students in the clinical psychology program, and the center appoints a student director each year. Our location within a university allows us to provide students with valuable work experience and faculty supervision. Clinic clients benefit from our evidence-based practices, multicultural experience, medical center access and flexible fees and scheduling.
In order to facilitate the training relationship between our clinicians and clinical supervisors, each session is video and audio recorded. This allows our clinicians to work with their licensed supervisors to provide you the best standard of care possible. We treat this confidential information with the utmost security, ensuring that these recordings are kept completely confidential and destroyed after viewing by our clinical staff.
Should you have any questions regarding these procedures, please do not hesitate to call us. Your comfort is our priority.
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