By Ruth Fallenbaum, Jane Hassinger and Lynne Layton

Comfort Ajuga and Meredith Henry, two students in the graduate program
in psychology at Chicago’s National Louis University, have been selected as
this year’s recipients of the Psychoanalysis and Social Responsibility Black
and Indigenous Scholarship Award. Comfort and Meredith were selected
by faculty at their school, in part on the basis of their commitment to
working in their communities and with an openness to psychoanalytic
theory and practice. Each is receiving a stipend of $1250, which they are
free to spend as they wish, as well as registration for Division 39’s Spring
Meeting and a year’s membership in the division, Section IX, and PEP-web.
The students also chose to work with clinician/mentors from Section IX,
and Section IX Board Members Diana Sencherey and Mamta Dadlani have
volunteered to work with the awardees. In this second year of the stipend
program, Division 39 has also designated an additional $1250 per awardee
for help in travel and lodging needed to attend the Spring Meeting, where
they will be invited to attend a luncheon hosted by Division 39’s
Scholar/Mentor program.

This scholarship program, which launched in January of 2023, represents a
small attempt to repair the decades of under-representation of Black and
Indigenous people in our field as a result of the systemic racism that has
permeated both our country’s education system and America’s mental
health professions.

Comfort Ajuga is a first year student in the graduate program in clinical psychology at National Louis University in Chicago, Nigerian-born Comfort radiates excitement at the opportunity to follow up on her long-held hopes of working as a clinical psychologist. When she was almost 15, her parents sent her to an aunt in Texas where they felt she could get a better education than she could in her home country. She quickly became
interested in psychology and was struck by the resistance to psychotherapy she found in her fellow African peers. They would ask, “How could talking to someone help you feel better?” Her own experience, however, taught her that “the main thing was to acknowledge that I have struggles in the first place.” She did her undergraduate work at University of Texas, Arlington as a psychology major. Her instructors mainly taught about CBT,
so she is excited to begin to learn about psychoanalytically oriented practice. Her interests are in personality disorders, schizophrenia, intergenerational trauma, and helping de-stigmatize mental health care in her community. Comfort will be mentored by Diana Sencherey, Member-at-Large on the Board of Section 9.

Meredith Henry is a licensed social worker now in her 2nd year of the Psy.D. program at National Louis University. “I’m a therapist to my heart,” she says; from a young age, she found that people would just spontaneously talk to her about their problems. Along with being a full-time student in the clinical psychology program, she sees patients privately in a group practice and is a mom of two daughters, 17 and 21 years old. Meredith first pursued social work training because of psychology’s tendency not to attend to patients’ social world and material needs. In her second year of the Masters’ program at U. of Chicago, she interned at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, which met her interest and desire to understand the “why” behind what people suffer from. She decided to pursue the Psy.D. to go deeper into the “why.” But she also appreciates and draws in her practice on CBT, ACT, and other modalities. She loves the diversity of the students in her program and loves learning and talking about theories as they relate to the experiences of others in her cohort who are doing various externships. Although
she is currently doing private practice work, she hopes to be able to address mental
health issues in larger systems. Right now, as part of her program, she’s working in a
psychiatric hospital for diagnostics where there are a lot of children in crisis. In the
future, she’s thinking about doing trauma-informed therapeutic work with police officers.
Meredith is excited about the scholarship and looking forward to working with her
Section 9 mentor, Mamta Dadlani.