Monika Friend, LCSW, CADC 1

I seek to provide clear, direct assistance and personalized, high quality mental health treatment to older adolescents, young adults, and adults. This includes guidance in navigating the world of mental health services, coordinating care, facilitating referrals, and corroborating about strategies for treatment. Seeking mental health services can often feel unfamiliar, frightening, and frequently carries a sort of stigma with it. However, mental health problems are not a matter of being weak, deficient, or lazy. On the contrary, they result from multiple factors like illness, injury, family history, brain chemistry, and life experiences. To seek mental health services is a courageous and wise endeavor. It is my intention to encourage, facilitate, and support those seeking mental health services to ensure their return to healthy and adaptive functioning.

I provide a biopsychosocial mental health assessment at your first session to help guide recommendations and future treatment. I am on multiple insurance panels and have a few slots available for those without insurance, those who are with financial hardship, or have limited means.

It has been said that most people do not come to therapy to find solutions to their problems, but because they realized what the solution was and were terrified. Many times our issues and challenges, the places we get stuck, tend to create separation and isolation from ourselves and others, just at a time when we need to feel connection the most. Receiving assistance from a mental health provider can help normalize what you are experiencing, give you room to explore your challenges, and provide support to face any fears you experience surrounding any changes you want to make.

As far back as I can remember, I have been interested in the causes of human suffering and strategies we use to relieve it. Over the years, this interest motivated me to listen to my own pain and the pain of others, wanting to collect the knowledge and wisdom that sometimes only experience can give. Being a counselor allows me the opportunity to normalize the experience of human suffering and to build a sense of support and belonging, that is the arena where healing occurs. It feels like a privilege to be part of that process, like a sacred trust, and it inspires me to continually bring a genuine and authentic presence to my practice.