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Student Profile- Amity Condie

Amity Condie is a third year MSSW Online student who plans to graduate in May 2023 with a Trauma Treatment Certificate and was recently selected as a Phi Alpha MSSW scholarship winner. Condie lives in Palmer, Alaska, and chose UTK’s program for its emphasis on neurobiology, epigenetics, and trauma treatment. 

What has been your favorite part of the experience so far?
I love connecting research and science within a broader context of social change. I am in the clinical track because I want to be able to provide integrated trauma therapy in my community but have also realized that meeting the mental health and substance use disorder treatment needs will require innovative solutions to integrate our service systems and help people access care in a more efficient and relevant way.

As you near graduation, what would you do differently in the program?  
I have learned a lot through my engagement in the College of Social Work’s anti-racism workshops. As I joined some of these groups to discuss racism and action, I was disappointed that so few students were participating, and the attrition rate was high. That was not due to lack of desire but really to lack of time. The full-time course load is packed, and many of my peers cannot join in extra anti-racism work. I discussed this with the Dean of Social Work and the Associate Dean of Equity and Inclusion in several grounded listening sessions. Addressing racism on campus will require integrated opportunities to practice anti-racism within required courses rather than having discussion spaces, workshops, and discussions be an extra activity outside of class.

Can you tell us about the Phi Alpha MSSW scholarship that you recently won?
As president of UTK’s Phi Alpha Honors Society Epsilon Iota Chapter, I was encouraging our members to apply for some of the national scholarships. I tried to make the information accessible to chapter members and remember saying in an officers meeting that if we don’t apply, we won’t get any scholarships. I did not think much about my application and was thrilled to learn that along with the honor of the first place MSW scholarship of $3000, I was invited to an all-expense paid trip to attend CSWE’s Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California, to present an outline of my scholarship application at the Phi Alpha Annual Business Meeting in November.

What are you interested in doing once you graduate?
I love my concentration field placement at Wisdom Traditions Counseling in Anchorage, Alaska. This integrated mental health and addiction recovery center uses a collaborative team approach to meet the needs of patients with co-occurring mental health and substance use challenges. The president and founder, Michael DeMolina, is a top national trainer in Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and Neurolinguistic Psychology (NLP). I am thrilled to have him as a mentor and for Wisdom’s supportive intern program.

After I graduate, I hope to continue working with Wisdom to help develop expanded opportunities for training community healers to expand access to trauma-informed mental health and substance use treatment. By becoming a trained body-based trauma therapist, I can promote efficient trauma resolution for individual clients. Along this journey, it has become clear that the solution cannot be to hope to have enough providers someday to meet the Matanuska-Susitna Valley’s (Mat-Su) complex behavioral health needs. We need to expand opportunities for community members to connect, provide, and receive support through programs that do not necessarily require direct supervision by practitioners with advanced degrees.

I am interested in learning more about traditional Alaska Native healing and supporting more culturally integrated responses to community and historical trauma. The two Alaska Indigenous Research Program workshops I attended through the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) provided a foundation for respectful collaboration with Native groups to address some of these challenges.