NIU Voices: Couple and Family Therapy Clinic is ready to help

If you had a fever or cough that wouldn’t go away, you’d make an appointment to see a doctor. When your relationship needs a boost, reach out to the Couple and Family Therapy Clinic. We’re ready to help couples and families improve communication, reduce conflict, manage anger and strengthen boundaries. We also provide human connection, care and support.

It’s no secret that couples and families are facing additional pressures as a result of COVID-19. Working from home, running a household and parenting during a pandemic isn’t easy. Public health actions, like social distancing, can make people feel isolated and lonely.

For more than 20 years, NIU College of Health and Human Sciences has operated the Couple and Family Therapy Clinic to help you cope with issues and challenges that affect your everyday life.

Our clinic provides high-quality, mental health services with a special expertise in relationships to NIU and the surrounding community and now we can help you virtually.

In response to COVID-19, the clinic successfully switched to Telehealth therapy, using Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliant video and phone sessions. Telehealth offers a safe space to discuss conflicts or problems with a partner, roommate, spouse, family member or child and allows us to support our clients even when we can’t meet face-to-face.

These are challenging times for our community, and now it’s even more important to ask for support.

We provide assistance with challenges such as everyday stress from responsibilities and decisions; child and adolescent behavioral problems; more persistent difficulties such as depression and anxiety; coping with addiction; feelings of despair, loneliness or fear.

Our therapists are trained to provide sensitive, appropriate, effective therapy that both considers and values your background, spiritual beliefs, gender, sexual identity, age and socioeconomic status.

All clients are treated by trained student-therapists who are being supervised by licensed faculty clinicians. We ask you to pay what you can afford, and a sliding-fee scale gives clients of all income levels access to our high quality care.

The Couple and Family Therapy Clinic is located in Wirtz Hall on the NIU campus. We are open Monday and Wednesday from noon to 9 p.m.; Tuesday and Thursday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

To schedule a HIPAA-compliant video or phone session, call 815-753-1684 or email familytherapy@niu.edu. To learn more about our providers and services, visit go.niu.edu/clinics.

We are accepting new clients! Couples who start counseling in September will receive six free sessions.

• Natalia Vinokur is the clinic director of the Couple and Family Therapy Clinic at Northern Illinois University.