Joellen Rhyndress

LMSW, LCSW, Clinician

Joellen is a licensed clinical social worker with 20 years of experience providing crisis response and behavioral health support. She graduated from Grand Valley State University with a master’s in social work. She has worked extensively with first responders and communities recovering from natural disasters and mass casualty events. She has personal experience with first responder culture as she has grown up in a law enforcement family. She also has personal and professional experience with officer-involved shootings, first responder suicide, and line-of-duty deaths. Joellen is a frequent speaker on childhood and post-incident trauma, suicide, violence, occupational stress, trauma-informed agencies, psychological first aid, and wellness. She has experience in policy development and planning, team supervision, and direct care.

Joellen is incident command system/national incident management system trained. She has been a member of the Red Cross extreme hazard and mass casualty teams as a disaster mental health provider and trainer. She is a clinical advisor for National Park Service Law Enforcement Ranger peer support team and she provides clinical advice to first responder peer support teams and law enforcement crisis negotiation and emergency response teams. Joellen has held the role of clinical advisor for an international charity serving traumatized children and veterans mental health court.

Joellen is an embedded clinician in North Carolina with the Asheville police and fire departments and the Hendersonville police and fire departments. She provides brief interventions, clinical consultation, training, and individual counseling. Joellen is a clinician on the Western North Carolina Peer Support Network, participating in defusings, critical incident stress management debriefings, and crisis management briefings to support and deliver specialized post-critical incident services to emergency personnel nationally. She focuses on providing quality empirically based therapy like eye movement desensitizing reprocessing (EMDR), cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), prolonged exposure therapy (PE), and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).

Joellen is from Michigan and enjoys all-season outdoor activities with her husband, four sons, and two daughters-in-law. She loves to cook, travel, dance poorly, listen to music, and ride motorcycles.