CSPP Student Profile: Amy Backos

Amy Backos is a fourth year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Alliant’s San Francisco campus. Amy came to CSPP with 10 years of experience as an art therapist, having also kept a studio and worked for a sweater designer in Ohio. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Kent State and her Master’s from Ursuline College, and has already attended and presented at many professional events including an international research conference in Argentina.

“I came back to school because I have bigger and better ideas for art therapy. There are not a lot of art therapist that could empirically validate art as a therapeutic technique.” Since beginning the program, Amy has benefited greatly. “After ten years of practice, I’m getting much more focused. My practicum experiences have helped me focus. I’m a fan of the personal psychotherapy recommendation. I feel like all the aspects of the program have really honed me. I feel a lot more polished.”

CSPP at Alliant is the only school she applied to in the area. “The thing that caught my attention was its history as one of the first schools to apply this practitioner model,” says Amy. The professional school is the wave of the future. It makes so much sense. That aspect really appealed to me. Alliant is better than the traditional schools because it’s your own ideas and you’re doing your own research. You’re not working for a professor and doing their work.”

Amy came to CSPP with several research experiences, beginning with a project she took part in during her time at Kent State, in which she collected data for a study on attachment theory. For her Master’s Thesis at Ursuline she researched art therapy as an intervention for rape victims, focusing on self portraits. “Self Portraits are incredibly revealing. It was profound for the people in the group. They could equate the drawings with their self esteem,” says Amy.

For the last two years Amy has completed research at the San Francisco Veterans hospital, working with its art therapy group. She plans to do an outcome study with them and is working with Stanford on a possible pilot study. She is also focused on qualitative investigation of the intervention, and is hoping to turn her findings into a manual which answers the question, ‘are symptoms of PTSD reduced by art?’ “I believe it will reduce PTSD, but ultimately I want to create more treatment options.” Amy is already receiving attention for her research and is working on an article to be published in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association. “There’s a big interest in it, finding alternate ways of healing. Everyone knew it, now we can show it. I want to be able to convince the psychiatrists."

Amy just finished her practicum at Richmond Area Multi-Services (RAMS), a private, non-profit, comprehensive metal health agency. It is also an APA training site. Amy was there practicing verbal and art therapy. "I’m really trying to learn what I don’t know. The training there is unbelievable, it’s psychodynamic oriented.”

Amy’s favorite course is neuropsychology, taught by Dr. Michael Drexler, who is a geropsychologist/geriatric neuropsychologist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. "If I had taken that in undergrad I would have been a neuropsychologist. Dr. Drexler is so good. It’s brilliant that he’s a practicing neuropsychologist and then comes and teaches it. I love that the professors her are working in the field.”
Amy also appreciates the breadth of requirements CSPP has. “I used to work with kids but have now had to work with adults at the VA hospital. That was profound. If there wasn’t a requirement I never would have discovered that demographic,” she says.

Amy struggled to transition from full time employment and being in the professional world to becoming a student again, but has felt bonded with CSPP students and professors who come from a professional work environment. In addition to her work in the doctoral program, she currently works at Artfibers, a fine yarn manufacturing company, where she works as a pattern designer and also sells vintage fabric buttons.