Social/Emotional Skills & Mental Health Support

 

A happy, healthy student is a student who is better prepared to learn, grow and thrive both in the classroom and outside of the classroom. This is exactly why our elementary school, middle school and high school curricula and programming incorporate social/emotional skill-building and individual efficacy, along with mental health support thanks to our team of licensed psychologists and therapists.

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PARTNERSHIPS WITH LEADING PRACTITIONERS & ORGANIZATIONS

Our faculty, students and families benefit greatly from our strategic partnerships with many of the city and country's leading therapeutic organizations and practitioners.
  • Houston Galveston Institute trains our staff and provides mental health support to our students and their families and many of our staff therapists are HGI team members, as well.
  • Through our partnership with Our Lady of the Lake University, many of its Master's level candidates provide therapy services to our students as they pursue their LMFT, LPC and/or School Psychology licensure. AND we've been lucky enough to retain many of these therapist as part- or full-time members of our team once they complete their clinical hours.
  • Our on-site therapists bring their individual experience in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, mindfulness-based approaches, Marriage & Family Therapy and countless additional modalities to our campuses. We benefit from their continued studies (including many who are working with our students as they complete their dissertations) and their various specialties including anxiety, depression, child and adolescent therapy, baking therapy, suicide prevention and more.
  • We also extend this support to our greater community. Through our partnership with Menninger Clinic, many of our teachers visit its in-patient clients to ensure they continue to achieve academically while being treated for various mental health needs.

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INDIVIDUAL THERAPY

Our faculty and our community at large are deeply invested in the whole of each student who calls Xavier home. We recognize that more and more children and teenagers live with mental health diagnoses or learning differences, including but not limited to ADHD, anxiety, depression, mood disorders and more.

We also recognize that the best way for every child or teenager to excel academically begins with growing socially and emotionally. As such, we attend to our students' needs and circumstances, providing them with individual mental health support or therapy sessions on an ongoing or as-needed basis to ensure that when they enter the classroom, they are prepared to learn.

A child or teenager who is able to manage their anxiety, depression or overwhelm will certainly be more capable of digesting a rigorous curriculum and advancing in their educational pursuits. We tend to our students' emotional and social needs with as much energy and passion as our educational faculty do to their educational aspirations.

Additionally, our Xavier families take part in the process, so the work our students achieve on our campuses doesn't start and end with us.

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BAKING & CULINARY THERAPY

Josie Paul not only built and oversees our Counseling and Mental Health department at Xavier, but she is actively completing her dissertation as a PhD student in Social Health Sciences at Vrije Universiteit, Brussels. Our students are thoroughly enjoying taking part in her doctoral research which investigates how psychotherapy, in a culinary setting, co-creates a collaborative-dialogic space that enriches the identity stories of adolescents who struggle with anxiety.

More specifically, her goal is to gain insight into the experience and meaning of participating in collaborative-dialogic practices in a culinary setting and to explore the identity stories of adolescents who have been formally diagnosed or who self-identify as anxious, from the adolescent’s perspective.

Baking has proven to be a wonderfully therapeutic and enjoyable addition to our students' academic weeks and we look forward to learning the results from her research...and continuing to bring practices like baking therapy to our students moving forward.

NEUROFEEDBACK

While our students and families benefit from talk therapy, we embrace newer technologies and advancements in the psychological field.

Similarly, many of our students benefit from the empirically validated work of neurofeedback. Together, these therapeutic modalities enhance brain neuroplasticity, or the "ability of the brain to physically change in response to stimuli and activity by developing new neuronal/synaptic interconnections believed to be the physical substrate underlying learning."

Our students (and their families) and on-site staff facilitators revel in the opportunity to experience the benefits of their brains' changing. They gain an appreciation and recognition that through this work, they do have the capacity to learn and grow academically, socially and emotionally. They often find that they can live in harmony with their learning differences or mental health diagnoses.

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