“I am proud to say that I am a direct result of Khara and her supervision. My final year in graduate school would have been exceedingly more difficult if not for Khara’s commitment, compassion, and knowledge to her craft as a supervisor. She not only supervised myself, but many others as well and we all felt the same, “We were lucky to have her in the role of our training and development.” I’ve stayed in touch with Khara for years since then and continue to seek out her guidance. A book with such insight and direction is long overdue. This is ideal for both supervisee and supervisor. Thank you, Khara.”

“As we know, there is often times poor leadership in community mental health settings.

This book is a modern approach to supervision that looks at how important and unique the decisions of leadership and supervision can be in community mental health settings.

The vignettes support critical thinking and can be used as a teaching tool for organizations and supervisees to grow professionally when serving diverse clients in mental health.”

“As a supervisor, this book has helped me to recognize the importance of the roles I have with my supervisees. This new model outlines the fluidity of moving between the various roles with each individual supervisee to best support professional development in both myself as a supervisor and my supervisees.”

“As a Licensed Professional Counselor and Approved Clinical Supervisor who has been in private practice for well over 20 years, there’s a lot to like about The Empowerment Model of Clinical Supervision : A Roadmap through the Complexities of Community Mental Health.

For starters, to my knowledge, there has been little to nothing published that specifically addresses the supervision needs in community mental health - and that has bee a longstanding problem.

It’s obvious from reading the pages of this book that the authors have the heart, the wisdom, and the experience in agency work needed to know what’s missing and what is needed in the supervision of therapists the field.

Brindle and Murphy have peppered their book with almost 40 useful and realistic vignettes for supervisors to use in practicing their supervisory skills - each one underscoring a clear reflection of the authors’ own years spent in service to agency work.

They write with respect for and commitment to those clinicians who have chosen to take on the unique challenges and immense opportunities typically found in community mental health.

For this reason alone, this text should be found in the library of every mental health agency in America.

However, this text is equally applicable to clinical supervision beyond community mental health and addresses many topics that have to date only been superficially noted or ignored altogether in other texts on supervision.

Topics such as the all-too-common practice of supervises withholding information from their supervisors, the benefits of scaffolding information and skills so that new clinicians are better able to integrate these into their practices, the recognition of supervises’ performance anxieties and related fears and the languages of collaboration and coercion - and the roles each of these play in empowering or disempowering those newest to the profession.

The authors emphasize the need for clinical supervisors to engage in self-reflection and self-correction . . . and the needs of their supervisees to have self-reflection and self-correction modeled by their supervisors for them.

Other areas that I found particularly useful and not always addressed in such depth include:
* Preparing supervisees for crises (including what constitutes a crisis and warrants the supervisor being immediately notified, resources for various crises, mandatory reporting and recommended policies related to the same, critical incident documentation, safety planning, risk assessments, and preparing supervises for court room testimonies);
* Prioritizing self-care inclinical supervision (including viewing clinical supervision as self-care, creating self-care plans, recognizing distraction in supervision and distraction in clinical work as a red flag in self-care; and,
* Addressing the role of advocacy - both self-advocacy and client-advocacy (including what advocacy is and is not, what it looks like, what it sounds like, and where the boundaries are related to advocacy).

The Appendix in the back of the book provides numerous lists, forms, and documents to support any clinical supervisor in creating systems and structures of supervision. Lists include Questions to Ask in Supervision to Support Clinicians and Court Testimony Preparation Questionnaire. Forms include Supervision Evaluation, Individual Development Plan for Clinical Supervision, a form for documenting Weekly / Bi-Weekly Clinical Supervision, Clinical Incident Report, Suicide Risk Assessment, Individual Safety Plan, Family Safety Plan, and a brief Professional Disclosure Statement for Clinical Supervision.

By the time I finished reading this 228 page book, I had underlines on almost every page and yellow sticky notes with reminders on almost ever other page.

Most important of all, these Khara Croswaite Brindle and Christina Murphy have provided me and other clinical supervisors new ways of mentoring up therapists-in-training in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that feel respectful, authentic, and transparent - ways that ultimately empower new clinicians and foster collaborative relationships that, in turn, better serve our clients, our mental health professions, and ourselves.”