What Does It Mean To Be SCP President?
An Interview with Current President Dr. Mel Wilcox

By Ayla Goktan

Introduction

I interviewed Dr. Mel Wilcox, current Society of Counseling Psychology (SCP) President to explore her presidency. You can find Dr. Wilcox’s website here and her SCP president’s welcome here, which describes her presidential theme of Advancing a Critical Counseling Psychology. Critical psychology, which belongs to a broader family of critical theories, seeks to:

  • dismantle the biases inherent in mainstream psychology
  • challenge existing power structures
  • advocate for those facing oppression

You will see some of these themes in my abbreviated interview with Dr. Wilcox below, which has been shortened and edited for clarity. Brackets [] indicate content added for clarity.

Abbreviated Interview

Ayla:

How are you showing up today? And if you would like to, you can share why.

Dr. Wilcox:

You know, it's the middle of the semester. I’m still dealing with hurricane [Helene] stuff actively. So my battery is low but I’m here. I'm always grateful when I get to do something to actually focus on the things I'm passionate about.

Ayla:

You clearly list the three pillars of your research:

  • Culturally and structurally responsive psychotherapy and training
  • Racial and socioeconomic inequity in higher education
  • Critical whiteness, antiracism, and social justice more broadly

I was wondering how those three pillars might inform your role as SCP President?

Dr. Wilcox:

Absolutely, they are directly related to my different presidential initiatives. My presidential theme for the year is advancing a critical counseling psychology, which is to say, advancing an antiracist, anti-oppressive counseling psychology. I'm especially thinking about that in the education and training space, because education and training impact practice.

Dr. Wilcox goes on to describe several presidential initiatives:

  • A webinar series on topics related to structural competence, critical race theory and what that means in different domains (practice, research, education and training, and advocacy)
  • A commissioned group to do an updated counseling psychology model training program
  • An advocacy initiative on inequity in higher education.

Issues include student debt, food insecurity, housing insecurity, and the crumbling pathways to the profession, especially for people from historically marginalized groups

One thing I'm really excited about is one book, one SCP. So this is something that Helen [Dr. Helen Neville, past SCP President] started last year with Rest is Resistance [by Tricia Hersey]. I’ve selected Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl. I think we've made a lot of progress in talking about (and) in naming racism and that's important, and it also makes it a people of color problem. As opposed to talking about the role of white people, the role of whiteness, and understanding how whiteness functions. An example I often pull from one of the interviews in the book is someone who has a lot of serious health problems but will not apply for Medicaid because “that's something that's for welfare queens,” which is very much a racialized thing. And what do you do if that's your psychotherapy client? And more importantly, in what training programs are we teaching people how to handle that in psychotherapy?

Ayla:

How does your identity as a white person inform the way you approach the SCP presidency? And with intersectionality in mind, how do your other identities also inform the way you approach this presidency?

Dr. Wilcox:

You know, I am obviously a very white woman, a cisgender woman from a lower socioeconomic status background with disabilities. And so my positionality is complicated, but first and foremost, it's characterized by whiteness and proximity to power in that way. And that means that there is a fluctuating combination of caution and boldness that I feel like are important.

Ayla:

How do you incorporate rest and take care of yourself?

Dr. Wilcox:

I feel like I've been doing better at that, and some of that is privilege, right? I just got tenure this year, so that's important to acknowledge. White supremacist, patriarchal capitalism encourages us to drive ourselves into the ground on its behalf, both so that profit can be made and so that we're too tired to protest. Knowing this deeply to my core has helped me recapture focus on my health and my well-being. It means that more things fall through the cracks, but I am less willing than ever to give up on fitting joy into my life. I just was able to be at niece and nephew’s birthday party a couple of weeks ago around Philadelphia and you know, it takes time. But one of my favorite presidential address titles in SCP history was from Dr. Jo-Ida Hansen and it was something along the lines of, like, no one ever died wishing they had spent more time in the office. And I think about that all the time.

Ayla:

Is there a research paper or two that you've written that you're especially proud of?

Dr. Wilcox:

I do think that because my work spans different areas, that makes it even harder to choose. One answer for me is the structural competence paper that we published earlier this year. It was a theoretical piece, and we hope the first step in a long line and a shift toward a more structural antiracist model. Part of [applying this model] is recognizing there's a lot of knowledge gaps in our education and training [even before graduate school]. The example I often give is if no one ever learns about redlining and how that has led to de facto segregation in 2024 and what that means for educational opportunity, healthcare access, things like that—if they haven't learned that before, then it's not enough to say, oh, well, that's not our domain [in doctoral programs]. I think I'm especially proud of [the paper] too, because it's with an incredible team of scholars in counseling psychology who are just rock stars and amazing mentors and friends. And then I'm proud of the student debt research that we've done as well. [One example] is It takes money to make money, on inequities in student loan debt and economic stressors. As a first-generation student who encountered a lot of these things [myself], and then also knows that students of color have to deal with the economic stressors way worse than I even had to, it meant a lot to me to be able to gather and publish that data, to call attention to this problem.

Ayla:

How do you reconcile [these issues with graduate school] with your role in the system and advising students who go through this process?

Dr. Wilcox:

Yeah, it's not easy, you know. And this comes up a lot even for students who are grappling with their roles in the system. And I think something that's tough to come to terms with is the recognition that to make the choice to join this professional pathway is to choose to work within the oppressive system. I don't think that there's a right or a wrong in terms of what's the best place to try to affect change. I think we need people within and outside the system. I hope that there are people working on the outside of those oppressive systems so we can support each other’s work.

Ayla:

Since this interview is for SCP Connect, I was wondering, if you could write an article for SCP Connect, what would it be about? And would the topic be different if you thought you were writing for professionals in the field versus the public?

Dr. Wilcox:

There's a lot of things I would like to write about. Maybe something about the need to make this shift toward a critical counseling psychology, why it's important, what are the steps that need to be taken. Or speaking more [accessibly] to the structural competence model. You know, not everyone reads scholarly articles. Or the higher education piece, calling attention to the very real material conditions of students, of faculty, of academia in general. And I might do [these topics] for the public or for peers, it might just be framed slightly differently. You know, that [dismissive attitude] has been a long-running theme, but we ignore the larger economic issues. Student [and faculty and staff] well-being matters in and of itself. It matters. And it's also a symptom of a larger problem. So when you ignore that symptom, you ignore the larger problem and the larger problem is coming for everyone else too. Material conditions are different. They are worse now than they were [years ago].

Ayla:

Yeah. You're talking about a symptom of a larger problem, which affects everybody in the U.S. and it affects the clients we serve. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you would like to talk about?

Dr. Wilcox:

I don’t think so. This has been lovely, I really appreciate you taking the time.

Conclusion

If you want to become more connected to the Society of Counseling Psychology, its past and present initiatives, its values, and its research, here are some resources:

Thanks again to Dr. Wilcox for her time and leadership!

Ayla Goktan (she/her) will be entering her fourth year in the University of Louisville Counseling Psychology PhD program in Fall 2024. Her salient identities include but are not limited to being a Turkish-American heterosexual cisgender woman who grew up middle class. Ayla is interested in doing health psychology research and working in medical settings. She is a member of the American Psychological Association (including APAGS, Division 17, and Division 54), the Kentucky Psychological Association, and the Functional Neurological Disorder Society. In her free time, she runs, writes poetry, plays the flute, and spends time with loved ones.