Tina Kim, MD
As a psychiatry resident at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Tina Kim, MD, had plenty of opportunities to treat patients in traditional clinical settings. But the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai also offers a less conventional locale: The First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem. Since 2016, the church has partnered with Mount Sinai to provide free mental health services to the community through its novel Healing On Purpose and Evolving (HOPE) Center.
The HOPE Center was the brainchild of Senior Pastor Michael A. Walrond, who wanted to find a way to support the significant mental health needs of his congregation. He found an eager partner in Sidney Hankerson, MD, MBA, Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Community Engagement in the Department of Psychiatry at Icahn Mount Sinai. Dr. Hankerson is also Director of Mental Health Equity Research at Mount Sinai’s Institute for Health Equity Research and serves as Medical Director of the HOPE Center.
In 2023 and 2024, during her final year of residency, Dr. Kim joined the HOPE Center as one of the first psychiatry residents to participate in the program. “In the clinic, we often encounter folks who for a variety of reasons have a hard time accessing care,” she says. By offering free services, in a setting where community members already feel safe and supported, the HOPE Center tries to chip away at the twin challenges of cost and stigma. “I wanted to try practicing in a place that was addressing those barriers head on,” she says.
Fighting Stigma with Community-Based Mental Health Services
Overcoming stigma has been a driving force for the HOPE Center since its founding. “Pastor Mike would talk about therapy during his sermons, emphasizing that it is normal and healthy and should be talked about,” Dr. Kim says. In another effort to destigmatize treatment, HOPE Center health care professionals don’t refer to their clients as “patients,” but rather as “innovators.”
Many of those seeking services are living with depression, anxiety, or prolonged grief disorder. Others struggle with substance use or loneliness and isolation. “There is a lot of loss and trauma in this population, especially after COVID-19, but including childhood trauma as well,” she says.
People can come to the HOPE Center for up to 12 free sessions of evidence-based therapy. That therapy is mostly delivered by licensed clinical social workers and social work interns. Last year, Dr. Hankerson expanded the HOPE Center’s capabilities by adding psychiatry residents to the team. In addition to providing therapy, the psychiatrists can prescribe and manage psychiatric medications when appropriate.
The whole team meets regularly to discuss cases. While the social work interns offer a lot of knowledge about peoples’ lives, families, and communities, the psychiatric residents provide clinical input about things like their medical histories, diagnoses, and medication side effects. “It’s a great collaborative relationship,” Dr. Kim says.
The program has proved popular, with a waitlist that often contains dozens of names. To meet the demand, the canter also offers group programs such as grief support groups and men’s mindfulness sessions. In addition to providing one-on-one therapy and medication management, Dr. Kim also provided couples counseling and helped lead public conversations on topics such as holiday blues, stress management, and crisis and suicide.
Sidney Hankerson, MD, MBA, Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Community Engagement in the Department of Psychiatry, serves as Medical Director of the HOPE Center, and Lena L. Green, DSW, LCSW, is the Executive Director.
Dr. Hankerson and his colleagues hope to keep growing opportunities for psychiatry interns, offering more psychiatrist-led therapy and medication management to members of the church community. He also hopes to replicate the community-based model for training psychiatry residents in other community settings, such as barbershops and sports leagues. Through those types of engagement opportunities, people in low-income communities can access culturally sensitive care while psychiatry residents can train within a curriculum that addresses the impact of structural racism on psychiatric care.
Training Psychiatry’s Next Generation at Icahn Mount Sinai
Working at the HOPE Center was a great launching pad for her future psychiatry career, says Dr. Kim, who completed her residency in June and is now an outpatient attending psychiatrist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. “In our work at the HOPE Center, we had a lot of autonomy to provide services and make decisions,” she says. Practicing within the small, independent team also helped Dr. Kim learn much of the behind-the-scenes administrative effort that goes into keeping a clinic running smoothly. “It was a really great learning experience and preparatory step toward becoming an attending,” she says.
Following her work at the HOPE Center, Dr. Kim was selected as a Community Diversity Fellow by the American Psychiatric Association, an opportunity for psychiatry residents committed to serving minority and vulnerable populations. Through that fellowship, she was able to attend many national meetings and conferences, and to collaborate as part of a national team working to increase leadership opportunities for psychiatry residents.
Dr. Kim says working at the HOPE Center is a rich opportunity for psychiatry trainees, and one that she encourages future residents to consider.
“The opportunity helped me learn to be confident in my own knowledge and experience. But I also recognize that a lot of it is in the hands of the innovator,” she says. “I can offer my knowledge and try to understand what’s going on for the other person in the room, but as much as possible we try to make decisions together. I want the innovator to choose the path that is right for them.”