Mary Andres, professor of clinical education at the USC Rossier School of Education, helped to establish and transform the school’s prestigious Master of Science in Marriage and Family Therapy program. Under her leadership, a post she has shared with professors of clinical education Ginger Clark and Ruth Chung, the program has prepared close to 1,000 licensed therapists, many of whom now serve in leadership roles in mental health organizations throughout Southern California and beyond.
Andres specializes in the treatment of substance abuse; working with couples and groups; sexuality and the treatment of sexual difficulties; gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered concerns; and clinical supervision. Her impact on mental health in the Los Angeles area has been profound. As Andres announced her retirement from teaching earlier this year, USC Rossier has launched a new scholarship in her honor, the Mary Andres Scholarship Fund, a continuation scholarship that will support students in their second year of studies.
In this interview, Andres reflects on her long and storied career at USC, the most rewarding part of working with students, the evolution of the MFT program and how she plans to continue living a good and interesting life.
You began teaching in USC Rossier’s MFT program in 2000 and were a co-lead of the program from 2016-2023. Can you tell us about your early days at USC Rossier and what the role of co-lead entailed?
I started working at USC as a staff psychologist at the counseling center. Then I started teaching in the social work program, and we supervised students in USC Rossier’s counseling psychology program. The school invited me to start teaching in 2000.
When I was recruited, Dean Gallagher was closing down the counseling psych PhD program because the school was shifting its focus to urban education. The master’s students had been more haphazardly admitted and were supported secondarily. The school’s focus was the doctoral candidates. Many master’s students came here hoping it was a means of getting admission to the PhD program.
They had just hired Ginger Clark and asked her to lead the master’s program. Ruth Chung left her tenure-track position to be one of three full faculty focused on building out the program. Ginger was the formal lead, but we’ve always been a team. Ginger was great at the details. She was the one who really brought us up to a code of excellence, looking at what requirements were needed for licensure, which led to curriculum review and implementation.
My strength was building relationships, both on the front end of recruiting students and with our alumni. We have a Facebook group of over 800 people who stay actively engaged. Ginger is still on the faculty, but when she took on a position in the Provost’s office in 2016, she wanted to pass on the leadership mantle. So, Ruth and I shared it at that point.
How has the MFT program evolved since you and Professor Chung took over leadership of the program?
We’ve doubled the program in size, and this year we’re starting an MFT online program and Ruth has started a Doctor of Education in Mental Health Leadership (online) program. These expansions are responses to the needs of the community. There’s a need for practitioners with strong training in other parts of the state and country, and the MFT online program will provide that. The new EdD degree came about because so many of our alumni are moving into leadership positions and the scope of what they learned in the master’s program wasn’t enough. They also want to be able to teach and for that, they need more than a terminal master’s.
We have also become an incredibly competitive program. We enroll a small proportion of our applicants to ensure that they are mission-aligned and good candidates for our cohort model. People understand the value of what they’re getting because our reputation is so solid. Students with great potential are making this 60-unit commitment because they align with our mission and decide it is a worthwhile investment.
I read that you have been a psychologist in the Semester at Sea program. Could you tell me more about that experience and what are the unique challenges of providing mental health care while at sea?
Semester at Sea is a closed system. Once you’re on the ship, that is it. We become a community.
The first time I sailed, there were 450 students; the second time, there were over 600 students. My job was the overall well-being and responsibility for the mental health of the ship.
So, the students are traveling for a semester. Sometimes we’re in countries for 2 to 5 days interacting with local communities, visiting schools, and other groups. I remember meeting some of the leaders in South Africa and visiting Robben Island, and I’m walking alongside students and we’re having conversations about how their minds and lives are expanding by this exposure. A lot of entrepreneurs and leaders come out of the Semester at Sea program.
There are also challenges. There are interpersonal difficulties. I had situations where people had very dire crises happening at home and we had crises on the ship. At the very end of my last trip, someone died. The ripple effect of that was really traumatizing. We had to anticipate that the students’ reentry wasn’t going to be a normal reentry. We had to tell their parents, “Hey, your kid is in the middle of a crisis situation. We have some aftercare plans for how you might want to help them when they get home.”
It had its blessings. I got to see amazing places, but it also challenged me to the core in terms of being able to do crisis management and work with large systems.
You’ve dedicated many years of your life to preparing the next generation of MFT therapists. What would you say has been the most rewarding aspect of this part of your career?
I’m the course lead on the very first class students take when we start role playing and the course lead on their last two classes.
The students start off with impostor syndrome. Half of them feel like, “Oh, I think USC made a mistake letting me in.” They look to their left and right and say, “I think everybody else is smarter than I am and more ready for this.” And I say, “Don’t worry. We’re so selective in who we pick. We’ve got you. We’re going to help you learn what you need to do.”
By the end of the program, they are so polished—they’ve been working with clients for 7-8 months. They’ve learned the research side of things and they’ve done a lot of journaling and self-reflection. They’ve been in courses where they’re examining their own lives and looking at their development. We’re teaching them mindfulness. They’re super grounded. And then they have the stress and trauma of working with people on the front lines of poverty, addictions and mental health crises. But when I see them in their last semester, they’re ready for it.
We have a very robust alumni network; every time we conduct admissions interviews, I have 15-20 volunteers who come back and help me. They consult, hire and recruit with one another all the time, continuing our vision of a “Beloved Community.”
They’re supervisors in the field now, transforming public mental health systems by going in at the bottom and working their way up and staying healthy. They are now visionary leaders in a lot of the mental health agencies around town.
Over the past decade, we’ve seen a cultural shift toward mental health and therapy. What do you think helped bring this evolution along?
A lot of things have helped bring it along. Technology helped. When the Arab Spring happened, all of a sudden, we were aware of things happening in the world that we would not have otherwise known. Now people are talking and naming things. Where there used to be secrecy and shame, some of that is dropping by the wayside. Part of that is that we’re acknowledging that there are systems of inequity and challenges and dysregulation. People are asking what a path forward looks like. Mental health is part of that conversation.
This is your last year teaching in the MFT program. What will you miss the most?
I work with amazing faculty. I will miss being part of the team, having a shared responsibility with others. It’s been an incredibly rewarding career. There are many things that we’re teaching in the program that I never learned. So, passing on the mantle to someone who has been trained more recently than I have is the right decision for the program. I will miss the relationships with the students and my colleagues, but I will not miss deadlines!
A new scholarship, the Mary Andres Scholarship Fund, was recently announced in your honor. What are your hopes for the impact of this new fund?
In the second half of our program, our students volunteer about 20 hours/week to work with clients. My vision has been that we have continuation scholarship funds to help them out, to thank them for what they are giving, and to facilitate prioritizing self-care and nourishing themselves however they might need. My hopes are that students know that we are invested in them thriving as they complete their last year and that they finish strong.
As you think about the future of providing mental health services, what are you most excited about?
Because mental health is more readily talked about, we have the potential to have a more transformative effect in stabilizing communities. If we can self-regulate, in terms of our reactivity— being purposeful and intentional—then we have the opportunity to help people show up in their preferred way of showing up. We can help them express what they need to say in a thoughtful, caring way so that they can be heard and create and facilitate a sense of generosity that they can then extend to others.
When we are in systems that are in crisis or under stress, there’s a certain brittleness and harshness in our communications. This idea of well-being and self-care, starting with ourselves, creates a better environment for everybody to thrive in.
On the other hand, what do you think are the biggest challenges for the next generation of therapists?
The impact of technology. So many people are struggling with short attention spans. We have a younger generation who have difficulty with emotional intimacy, in terms of making eye contact and being able to talk with one another face-to-face, because we are so used to relying on our devices.
I describe therapy as a slowed-down conversation. Therapists are also growing up in this same culture of distractibility and using their devices for avoidance. They start with the idea that they want to be a good listener, an agent of change and a healer. We have to practice what we’re going to preach. That’s going to be one of the challenges—that we do what we need to do so that we can be well enough to offer that same healing space that gives somebody a felt sense of being cared for and understood.
After you take a step back from teaching, how do you plan to spend your time?
I have a small practice in Venice where I work with adults and couples, and I’ll continue to do that for a while. I will be traveling more. I’m going to New York and Italy in May, and I am going to Hong Kong in August. I’ll be hiking more. I go to the library every week, and I will be reading more, doing more art and spending time with loved ones.
It has been such a privilege to be a fellow traveler with people when they're in the beginning, middle and end of their change process. I watch the students grow in the program and I witness change over time in my clinical work too. I've gotten used to being invited into a part of someone's life. This idea of endings is actually an important part of therapy and life.
I’ve always told my students that you have to keep your life interesting because it is not good to live vicariously through your clients. So part of my goal is to keep having a good life, to keep living an interesting life.
Mary Andres
- Professor of Clinical Education
