Joseph

Levy

Undergraduate School: Duke University

Doctoral Program: University of Colorado Boulder, Clinical Psychology PhD program

Interests & Career Goals: I approach clinical work from an evidence-based orientation, and a foundation of my approach is the cultivation of mindful awareness to support both my and my clients’ capacity to learn from our experiences and identify strategies to move forward effectively. My training has focused on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Behavioral Activation, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Dialectical Behavior Therapy. From these perspectives, I bring curiosity to the complex humanity of each client, the interpersonal dynamics of our therapeutic relationship, and the contingencies that reinforce effective and ineffective patterns. As a therapist, I aim to arrive with curiosity, flexibility, and attention to my own behavior to offer the therapy most likely to support meaningful change. 

My research draws inspiration from an assumption that all people – not just clinicians – have the inherent capacity to help others and aims to leverage this inherent capacity in service of promoting population-level mental health. The population-level impact of an intervention can be estimated as the product of four factors – the effect of the intervention on those who participate in it (direct effect), the number of people who participate in the intervention (uptake), the effect of the intervention on those who do not directly participate in it (indirect effect), and the number of people reached by this indirect effect (spillover). Mental health intervention research has largely focused on direct effects, and through this work, has developed many efficacious interventions. The guiding methodology of my research is to translate these direct effects into population-level impacts through increasing uptake, spillover and indirect effects. Through this lens, I have researched mindfulness-based interventions and other-focused interventions. I hope my research will contribute to making uptake, indirect effects, and spillover standard considerations in mental health research.