Faculty Feature

Amy Blanchard, PhD

Doors Open for a Pioneering Spirit

Amy Blanchard, PhD Amy Blanchard will be the first to tell you that "doors just seemed to open at the right time" on her path to AUNE.

Amy, a core faculty member in the Department of Applied Psychology's Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) program, grew up in Connecticut and earned a bachelor's degree in family studies from the University of Connecticut. A job at an after-school drop-in center, however, quickly burned her out. "I found the work I was doing with the kids extremely frustrating, because the influence I could have on the children and the change possible was so limited without parental involvement," she said.

She soon became interested in marriage and family therapy because of its approach. "It encouraged me to look beyond an individual to include their family and community," she said.

A Pioneer in North Carolina

She entered graduate school at East Carolina University in North Carolina, doing internships in the hospital system and researching Parkinson's disease and families. At that time, the university was starting the first doctoral program in a new subfield of marriage and family therapy called medical family therapy (MedFT), and Amy entered the program. While at East Carolina, she had become very interested in yoga, Pilates and running, as well as alternative ways of healing. "MedFT brought everything together for me," she said. "It provided me with a frame to bring together my interest in holistic health, the mind body connection and systemic therapy."

While in school, she worked on a research study of biophysical indicators of preterm birth. One striking finding was that thirty-three percent of the women in the study had depressive symptoms that were not being treated. "This prevalence rate really struck me-it is far higher than any other pregnancy complication such as diabetes," Amy said. She also found that social support played a large role in the experience. She set out to find out more about how she could help these families and, since 2004, has been studying perinatal mood disorders in families, as well as working with these families.

A Pioneer in New Hampshire

In 2008, she moved north for a one-year internship at the New Hampshire Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency program at Concord Hospital in Concord, attracted by the training but also a return to New England. At Concord Hospital she helped pioneer the postpartum depression (PPD) program, which screens all women and offers support for PPD.

Life was good. Amy was starting to feel settled; she had made wonderful friends, found a professional community and met her life partner. She was close to her family of origin in Connecticut. "It was so timely that, just as I was on the national job market, AUNE was hiring for a new faculty member in the MFT program," she said. "Why wouldn't I want to work in a high-quality, accredited master's program in New Hampshire? But then to learn that they were just starting a doctoral program the year I was to join the faculty was like the icing on the cake.

"As a member of the first graduating class of doctoral students at East Carolina, that pioneering spirit was very alive inside me and I wanted to keep it going! In addition, I was impressed with the social justice mission of Antioch, and it felt good to meet people who were like-minded in that way."

"It has been so rewarding to do this work that I am so passionate about at AUNE."

AUNE's MFT doctoral program graduates its first class this year. "It has been so rewarding to do this work that I am so passionate about at AUNE," Amy said.

One of the creators of ASD support group

Amy is a licensed marriage and family therapist and a clinical member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. She helped launch AUNE's Friends and Family of Individuals with Autism and Asperger's support group, now in its second year. She talks about it here:

Q: You're one of the founders of the Friends and Family of Individuals with Autism and Asperger's. What convinced you that there was a need for this kind of support group in the community?

Amy Blanchard: I was approached by Shelley Viles, the director of the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) program at AUNE, with the idea to collaborate on starting a group. The ASD program is very active with the autism community in the region-Shelley, in particular-and she had had several inquiries from parents wondering where they could find a support group. We were all surprised there was nothing around.

The idea of running a group for families with children who have ASD is consistent with the mission of the Antioch Couple and Family Therapy Institute, which is to provide high-quality, low-cost and confidential clinical services to the residents of Keene and surrounding communities and to train excellent family therapists.

Our clinic is new, and we are still doing quite a bit of marketing, so we thought this would also help families to know we are a resource for them for family therapy, in addition to the support group.

Q: What do you see as the group's greatest benefits for families with children who have ASD?

Amy: Support from a family-centered approach. I think that many families struggle with similar issues but struggle alone. It is wonderful to have a place where the whole family can come and vent, unload and get suggestions and education from others who are going through something similar or who have in the past.

The entire family is affected by ASD, so to have something for all, including siblings and those children with a diagnosis, seems great to me. I remember the first night, overhearing a child diagnosed with Asperger's say to another, "This is great; we both have Asperger's and we just met and we are not being socially awkward." I also watched with a parent as her child participated in movement activities with the dance therapists. The mom teared up, because her daughter would not participate in other settings, but here she found a sense of comfort.

Q: The group is facilitated by faculty and students from several different programs in the Department of Applied Psychology. How does that collaboration help the parents in the group? How does it benefit your students in Marriage and Family Therapy and you as a teacher and a practitioner?

Amy: I think it helps us provide the multidisciplinary services I described above. As marriage and family therapists, we focus on the whole family-coping and adapting, couple relationships, sibling dynamics and so forth, but we have learned a ton from the ASD students about the diagnosis of autism. It's the same with the dance/movement therapy program-I knew nothing about how to use movement therapeutically, so I've learned a lot.

The students are given the opportunity to learn from each other and share their expertise. In addition, it gives us as faculty another opportunity to train experientially. That is, we are there supervising the students' work in real time. This is so much better than learning something and talking about it "as if."

Q: The Friends and Family of Individuals with Autism and Asperger's group starts up again in September. Do you anticipate any changes or improvements?

Amy: Yes. When the group started last fall, we really hit the ground running and learned a lot along the way. Initially we were expecting maybe twelve or so people to show up; our first night we had about thirty!

So we spent the first few months learning how to break up into smaller groups, how to manage the space and learning the needs of the participants. Now that is all under control and we can focus on enhancing and expanding.

In the spring we piloted the movement groups for some kids on the spectrum. It was fabulous, so that will continue, and we plan to offer a group for neurotypical siblings as well. I know the participants are also interested in having something tailored to a teen-aged group, and we are working on that as well.

Q: Talk a little about your work at AUNE.

Amy: My training is in medical family therapy, which is a specialty area within marriage and family therapy. I have long focused on how families organize around issues of health and illness such as Parkinson's disease or cancer. I have trained with physicians and residents about how to integrate a holistic approach in our current medical system. I see the work with the ASD group an extension of this.

I honestly did not have any training in ASD prior to the group, and I have been learning a lot about the diagnosis in general. But I see that the same dynamics exist with any diagnosis, as families try to make meaning and to cope and are forced to reorganize around something they did not expect or necessarily want.