Joellen Rhyndress

LMSW, LCSW, Clinician

Joellen has more than 15 years of experience providing crisis response and trauma-related behavioral health support. She has done extensive work with first responders and with communities recovering from natural disasters and mass casualty events.  Joellen has personal experience as well with first responder culture as she has grown up in the LE family.  She has personal and professional experience with OIS and LOD.

She obtained her master’s degree in social work from Grand Valley State University and is a frequent speaker on mental health, first-responder wellness, and post-traumatic stress. Joellen also has extensive experience in community policy development and planning, team supervision and direct care.  Joellen is a credentialed instructor in Suicide Prevention.

Joellen is a member of the national disaster mental health extreme hazard and mass casualty teams for the Red Cross and is Incident Command System/National Incident Management System trained. Her last deployment was to Dayton Mass Shooting.

She previously led a team that responded to traumatic events for a community mental health organization. She has been the clinical supervisor for Assertive Community Treatment team and a psychiatric hospital clinician.

Joellen is one of our Embedded Behavioral Health Clinicians at Asheville Police Department, Hendersonville Fire Department, Hendersonville Police Department and Transylvania County Sheriff Office.  She delivers brief interventions and individual therapy to all emergency personnel. Joellen is a clinician on the Western North Carolina Peer Support Network, participating in Debriefings, Defusing’s and Crisis Management Briefings to support and deliver specialized post-critical incident services to emergency personnel in Western North Carolina. Joellen focuses on providing quality therapy using empirically based treatments including Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) , Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy  (DBT). Joellen has worked with individuals with trauma, mood, psychotic and substance mental health issues.