The Bay Area Asylum Mental Health Project is receiving more requests for *pro bono* evaluations than our clinician network can provide. Recent changes in ICE procedures has resulted in many asylum seekers having much shorter time periods to compile necessary documentation for their cases.
Many asylum seekers do not have documentation of their trauma history and related symptoms to support their asylum application. Since asylum seekers who are declined asylum status are often sent back to their communities and families where political, gang, gender and sexual orientation based violence are often pervasive, it’s of great importance that asylum officers and immigration court have access to an accurate and full picture of an asylum seeker’s mental health, trauma history, and the possible effect on their mental health of being forced to return to their home country.
The training provide instruction on conducting the asylum seeker interview, report writing, small group activity as well as a presentation on the asylum process provided by an immigration attorney from one of our partner organizations.
After attending the training you will be provided a mentor, a peer consult group, sample interview questions, report templates and sample reports. Asylum seeker evaluations are typically 3 hours, done at your preferred time in your office, with a translator provided, if needed, by the attorney. Although the details of the evaluation interview process will be discussed in the training, it is essentially a standard evaluation that all licensed mental health clinicians are trained to provide, with a more detailed traumatic events history component. Report writing time varies based on individual writing style. New evaluators are typically given cases with a one to two month deadlines. No history of working with immigrants is required.
**We ask that clinicians who would like to attend this February 2021 training be able to accommodate in their schedule two evaluations over the subsequent few months: Accepting a first evaluation by April 2010, and accepting a second one by October 2021.
**If your schedule does not allow for evaluations in this time period, please wait to sign up for our winter training.**
The training fee is $100. Training fees support the operation of the Asylum Project.
If you are interested in the training, and can do your first evaluation in April 2021 and your second one by October 2021, please sign up asap as there will be limited spaces in this training.
If you haven't done so, please be sure to join our network before the training at
https://goo.gl/forms/uCZlXGyEjh6tgZiI3Please make your payment through *before the training* paypal using this link
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=QYLZTMJ9MCSV2&source=url*Please email us, ahead of the training* to
cliniciandocs@riww.org :
Your professional license, liability insurance, and CV. If you don't have a current CV, please send a brief document with information about your graduate training and current mental health work.
Reminder: You will need to be licensed in CA and have liability insurance to perform asylum evals. If you don't have these, you can still volunteer for the asylum project in non-clinical ways. Please email us at
info@riww.org for more information.
We hope you will join us in this incredibly rewarding work and look forward to meeting you.
