Natalie Arbid’s research focus is on mental health supports for Latinx students
The Society of Clinical Psychology chose UMass Boston student Natalie Arbid as this year’s sole winner of the Distinguished Student Leadership Award in Clinical Psychology. This award recognizes Arbid’s local and national and formal and informal leadership roles across scientific organizations, student organizations, the program’s Diversity Committee, UMB-UR-BEST, and Professor Elizabeth Roemer’s research team.
For her efforts, Arbid has received a plaque, a $200 honorarium, and a complimentary two-year subscription to Journal of Clinical Psychology and Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session. The Society of Clinical Psychology is one of the divisions of the American Psychology Association.
Arbid is just wrapping up her fifth year in UMass Boston’s Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program. The Los Angeles native has been very active since arriving on campus. She has served as a copresident of the Clinical Graduate Student Assembly; she’s been a member of the Graduate Student Assembly; she’s been a cochair of the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program’s Diversity Committee; and she’s been a part of the Bridging Perspectives Committee, a space where clinical psychology students and faculty can talk about difficulties they are experiencing around identity and diversity. Arbid has run the Roemer Lab for the last two years, taught and mentored undergraduate students, and she’s been a part of a mental health and health promotion outreach service on campus called UMB-UR-BEST.
“Not only have I developed workshops around stress management, I’ve given them, and I’ve done consultations with different departments who are struggling with figuring out how to meet the mental health needs of their students,” Arbid said.
In May, Arbid and the other doctoral students who are part of this mental health promotion service received the Beacon Group Service Award at the Beacon Leadership Awards Ceremony.
Arbid has cowritten a book chapter on mindfulness-based therapies with Roemer, her advisor. Arbid’s research and clinical interests match those of the Roemer Lab – culturally adapted mindfulness and acceptance-based behavioral therapies for people of color. For her dissertation, she conducted focus groups on a stress management workshop for the Latinx population. She offered an altered workshop based on the feedback she received this spring.
“I think a lot of students on campus struggle with being a first-generation student … while also being an active member in their family, taking care of Mom, helping Dad out with things, sometimes providing financially for family,” Arbid said. “I changed some of the language on the slides … and I made examples that [the focus groups] gave me. The pictures and the images I’ve changed a lot as well. There’s a component of the workshop at the very end where we talk about how to determine what your goals are based on your values, so I used all the culturally-congruent values that the students talked about, so things like adhering to family and tradition and respect for elders.”
Arbid got the idea for her dissertation from her involvement with UMass Boston’s Latinx Student Task Force, which since 2017 has looked at the needs of this population. For the last two years, Arbid has been an ambassador for the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, promoting and developing content for the online support community, which is all in Spanish. She’s also a student representative for the Association of Behavioral Cognitive Therapies’s Integrated Primary Care Behavioral Medicine Special Interest Group.
Through the American Psychological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program, this summer Arbid is going to a research camp where she’ll get help around her dissertation. In the fall Arbid will start doing adult outpatient work at Mount Sinai as part of a one-year internship that’s required by the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program. Post-UMass Boston, she’s interested in working in a hospital on a primary care team.
“[For] a lot of people, their first entry into mental health care is really their primary care provider, not necessarily referring them to psychologists, so there has been a move in the field toward what they call integrated primary care,” Arbid said. “So I see myself potentially doing that, working on a team that is actually implementing that model in a hospital or being the person myself who helps the hospital implement that model of care.”