What prompted Debra Call, clinical supervisor at CHD’s Park Street Outpatient Behavioral Health Clinic in West Springfield, to pursue a career in social work? She remembers being a babysitter as a youth and “I was the one that would play with the kids rather than just watch them,” she said. “I was always curious about why kids did what they did.”

When Call got older, the Vermont native volunteered with a parent aide program, which provided home-based support to at-risk families for the state of Vermont’s child protection system. “I was interested in what made children tick—what made families tick,” she recalls.

Call received her BA in psychology from the University of Vermont, her MSW at Smith College, and holds an LICSW and is a CCTP-II (Certified Complex Trauma Professional). She interned at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Springfield, which provided her first experience with a diverse population. In her second internship at River Valley Counseling Center in Holyoke, she was part of the sexual abuse trauma team, which built her interest in trauma and its impact on the psyche, which continues to fascinate her. Much of Call’s work at present involves treating trauma and reactive attachment disorder—a mental health condition that affects children’s ability to form healthy attachments to caregivers.

She worked for years in the Children’s Study Home in Springfield (now Helix Human Services) as clinical director for family-based foster care programs.

Call, like other social workers, has seen more mental health issues among clients since the COVID pandemic, but recently what she’s been experiencing in therapy is some clients’ anxiety over “the increased uncertainty of what’s happening recently with all the new changes in government.”

She likes the fact that the theme for National Social Work Month this year is Compassion + Action. “That compassion is not only for the people that we serve. It’s for our fellow social workers,” she said, noting the vulnerability for burnout, with larger and larger caseloads in community mental health, often with just 10 minutes between sessions, and managing documentation and administrative tasks—not to mention trying to maintain a work-life balance at the same time. “As a supervisor, it’s always important to ask my staff, ‘How are you doing? What are you doing for self-care?’” she said. “Self-care is remembering to put time in for lunch and to take your vacations. And as for action, social workers can always be a catalyst for change, whether it’s for social justice, or empowering a woman in an abusive relationship with the ability to speak for her needs—making sure the client’s voice is heard, and the clinician’s voice is heard.”

Call embraces the “wins” in her job, recalling the victim of domestic violence she had counseled—a woman who had attempted suicide twice. The client ended up going to CHD’s Grace House, one of the few residential treatment programs designed for mothers in western Massachusetts. “She got her child back, has her own apartment, has been clean and sober for years, and works in a daycare center,” said Call. And then there’s a youth Call worked with for years with a history of hospitalizations who she ran into one day on a Springfield sidewalk—two years after she had last worked with him­—and he told her, “’I’m doing great now.’ That’s the power of social work,” she said. “Every voice counts.”