Lindsay Gavin, Ph.D., has spent the past eight years leading trauma-informed care at Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital. There she helped young patients understand how much past trauma has an affect on their mental health.

Now she is bringing that experience to Towson University as the new director of the Counseling Center.

She didn’t start out wanting to be in the psychology field. In fact, Gavin began college as an international business major.

After just a few classes, she realized business wasn't the right fit. She talked with her identical twin sister Lauren about what to do next. She likes to joke that they said, “What about psychology?” at the same time.

That shared moment led Gavin toward three degrees and a career in psychology that has spanned more than a decade. Now she is leading TU’s efforts to support students’ mental health as the director of the Towson University’s Counseling Center.

As she begins her first semester at TU, Gavin is looking forward to becoming integrated into the TU community and developing strong relationships with her staff.

“And I think right now is a time of great evolution with the growth of TU’s student health and well-being unit. My role is to help make sure that the Counseling Center is ready to meet that moment of evolution.”

Connecting her past to her present

When she recalls her initial leap in psychology,  she found it interesting to study human behavior. But it wasn’t until she started connecting her learning to her past where it became a true professional calling.

When you don’t have your mental health, nothing else matters.

Lindsay Gavin 

Concepts like learned helplessness—where a person believes they have no control over a situation—helped her process her experience with childhood trauma.

Seeing how trauma affected each member of her family differently sparked a professional passion for understanding how it shapes development, leading her to pursue a career in youth and family trauma.

“When I started to realize these connections, it made me feel like I was meant to be in this field,” Gavin says. “This feels like my calling, especially kids and youth trauma. I loved what I did, and it felt meaningful to me.”

Healing pediatric trauma

Prior to arriving at TU, Gavin worked at Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital, where she helped develop and directed the hospital’s Trauma and Healing Program.

There, she and her team worked to improve screening, assessment and treatment for youth experiencing trauma in order to improve a culture of misdiagnosing youth, particularly youth of color, with behavioral disorders rather than understanding that their behaviors and difficulties were rooted in trauma.

This lead to understanding and improving the significant gaps in trauma education within the mental health field.

“Every setting I've been in, I am like, ‘What is the trauma like, what is the trauma awareness and what are we doing to understand how it's affecting mental health?’” Gavin says. “Because there is a great silence around trauma in general. And in mental health, there were a lot of people who were very uncomfortable to talk about it. I started to see that's what I want to do in our field more globally.

"I wanted break down the silence of trauma and help both mental health providers and the community to understand that trauma is a very shared human condition that can affect all of us, and to more openly talk about it and address it."

The transition to TU

After years of intensive clinical work, Gavin began looking for an opportunity with broader organizational impact.

The director position at TU provided a unique opportunity for her to combine clinical practice with leadership, training and community engagement.

“It has all these things I want to do, all while getting to work as part of a system, getting more leadership experience and addressing mental health at a community level,” Gavin says. “It felt like a perfect next step. I even went to my old colleagues and told them this job has all the things I’m looking for.”

Goals for the Counseling Center

As Gavin begins her tenure at TU, her priority is building trust with Counseling Center staff while learning about the needs of the team and the students they serve.

She’s also working to expand the center’s vision beyond reactive services to preventative and community-based approach, which will help increase visibility across campus.

This includes helping to develop TU’s Mobile Crisis Response Team, a new initiative that pairs a mental health clinician with the Towson University Police Department during behavioral health crisis calls. This ensures mental health emergencies are handled with a trauma-informed, de-escalation approach to keep students safe.

"And I think right now is a time of great evolution with the growth of TU’s student health and well-being unit. My role is to help make sure that the Counseling Center is ready to meet that moment of evolution."

Lindsay Gavin

Gavin also wants to make sure the campus community understands that while it’s important that students get an education and a job, stable mental health is foundational for student success.

“When you don’t have your mental health, nothing else matters,” Gavin says. “It has to be at the center of your well-being. As a youth coming to college, this is a big transition of you figuring out who you are and what you want to do. None of that matters if you’re too anxious or depressed and can’t get out of bed in the morning.”