The Albert and Jessie Danielsen Institute at Boston University

The Danielsen Institute is the administrative center for this project and has an overall mission to alleviate suffering and to promote healing, growth, and change in the persons, communities, and institutions. This mission is pursued through clinical service, training, and research emphasizing empirically-supported relational approaches to depth psychotherapy and are informed by spiritual, religious, existential, and cultural perspectives on virtue, well-being, and meaning in life. The Danielsen Institute clinic is an outpatient community mental health center located on the campus of Boston University (but serving the wider community) with a multidisciplinary staff of psychologists, social workers, couple and family therapists, and psychopharmacologists. Research at Danielsen is led by Dr. Steven Sandage. The clinic provides over 10,000 hours of direct clinical service to over 300 clients each year, with half of its clients receiving fee reductions and subsidies due to economic need. Clinical staff also serve as training faculty and clinical supervisors for an interdisciplinary training class. The clinic is an APA-approved training site for pre-doctoral psychology internships and continuing education for psychologists, and is affiliated with and provides clinical training within the Solihten Institute, a network of over fifty mental health clinics with over 750 providers around the U.S. Dr. Sandage also provides annual training in Scandinavia through the Religion, Values, and Society Institute.

 

The Danielsen site project aims to understand how relational virtues contribute to mental health and well-being for both clients and therapists. The project uses the interdisciplinary relational spiritual model (RSM), which emphasizes holistic development through relational dynamics encompassing existential, spiritual, moral, and sociocultural dimensions. The RSM aligns with evidence-based relational psychodynamic and systemic psychotherapeutic approaches, incorporating the Multicultural Orientation (MCO) approach to psychotherapy and training. The project also acknowledges the significance of therapists' personhood, relational capacities, and virtue engagement in their effectiveness and professional well-being. Our overall aims for this site project include (a) leading cross-site collaboration in developing two sets of training and treatment tools including an introductory training module on virtue and flourishing (VF) in psychotherapy (Study 1), informed by research on therapist training and formation needs (Study 2); (b) identifying mechanisms of change in the formation of relational virtues in treatment outcomes, with implications for therapist training (Study 3); and (c) the development of clinical and training guidelines for VF in psychotherapy (Study 4).