This 1st-of-its-kind therapy bus is revving to change access to mental health care
Early in the pandemic, Doreen Upshaw had a dream. Standing outside a “big bus,” she felt a presence but saw no one. “Where are we going?” she asked. As the doors opened, she looked to her left and saw a sparkling children’s play therapy center.
It was meaningful to Upshaw, who’s “not a dream person” but is the founder and CEO of the North Side’s Compass Counseling and Support Services. Like others in her field, she was forced to practice virtually due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Adult clients adjusted easily enough, but the task was much trickier for her childhood clients, whose therapy is done through play until about age 8.
“Video therapy is from the neck up,” she said. “I don’t get to see if your legs are bouncing. I can’t get on the floor and play with you on video.”
Although she tried alternative ways of engaging her young clients, such as sending home packets full of art supplies, she eventually made the “heartbreaking” decision to stop the sessions with children, knowing the work wasn’t serving its purpose.
But her grief provided a launching pad for the idea she envisioned.
In July 2022, she held the ribbon cutting ceremony for exactly what she foresaw, a first-of-its kind mobile therapy center called CCSS-Mobile, for which she’s applied for a patent, and it’s ready to roll over barriers to mental health care.
Content of her character
Her family moved from the Hill District shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and resettled in Beltzhoover and then Northview Heights, where her informal counseling career began at around age 14, she says.
With her characteristic mix of directness blunted by the warmth in her voice, she was always “that person, that friend, that girlfriend,” a veritable magnet for those in need of a listening ear.
As an adult, she ran an inhome day care, the nursery at her church, raised two girls of her own, and spent 15 years in the U.S. Army Reserve as a telecommunications center operator, reaching the rank of staff sergeant.
Later, she earned a bachelor’s degree in community ministries, two masters degrees in professional counseling and Biblical exposition, and is about to earn a Ph.D. in urban ministry.
But that experience and education neither saved her from the heartbreak of losing her play therapy clients, nor does she credit it for the idea of a mobile therapy center: “Most people don’t believe the way that I do, but I know that dream was something straightout of heaven.”
So she got to work.
Magic bus
She contacted the Center for Women’s Entrepreneurship at Chatham College, which helps would-be business owners — especially those who are female, minority and/or veteran — hone the uniqueness and delivery of their ideas.
“I think what’s she’s doing with her mobile unit is a great idea,” said the director of the center, Anne Schlicht. “It’s getting to the customer, and it’s providing children with a safe space to get the services they need.”
With staffers’ pointers, Upshaw created a business plan and secured funding from the Urban Redevelopment Authority.
By December 2021, she purchased a used 15-passenger bus, and hired someone to gut it and add a generator (so she doesn’t need to idle for air circulation or electricity), cover the outside in decals that don’t allow anyone to see inside, and install a table, shelving and a blue floor, just as she saw in her dream.
Play therapy, in part, relies on stations, which are fully present on Upshaw’s bus. The “real life” station has dolls and kitchen items. There’s arts and crafts, “game therapy” as a reward and an “aggressive” station, with dinosaurs to smash together and mouths that “rawr.”
Upshaw doesn’t direct children to the stations based on her impressions of them: Kids are naturally drawn to areas that help express their thoughtsand feelings.
“Kids will show you everything that’s going on in their world through play,” she said. “Then, I can get in there andhelp them heal,” which is done by getting on the floor with them — on their level — and discussing the feelings they accidentally revealed simplyby playing.
‘I’m going wherever the kids are’
CCSS-Mobile addresses the disconnection she felt during the pandemic’s earlier days, but it also satisfies everyday needs within the community.
“Moms with three or four kids, how many times do I get a call saying, ‘Doreen, I just got in. I have to cook dinner and this and that. I can’t get over to you.’ Or when the weather gets bad,” she said. “How much easier is it that I can say, ‘ Your appointment is at 5, and I’ll be there, right in front of your door?”
Upshaw’s services are currently fee-for-service on a sliding scale to accommodate a range of incomes. She’s working toward coverage by private insurance and especially Medicaid because so many of her clients, financially or due to diagnoses like autism, fall into that category. And many of those individuals are minorities.
“With some of the populations we serve on the North Side, there are many ethnic minorities that have cultural barriers to care that this will fill that gap,” said Cathy Sigmund, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and chief behavioral health officer at North Side Christian Health Center. “I can give you countless adolescents that they’re on a trajectory to juvenile justice rather than behavioral health care because of the cultural differences in access to care. With this, there’s a normalization I believewill happen.”
That will be aided, in part, by private donations toward CCSS-Mobile, providing 30 children with five sessions each, free of charge.
To recruit children in need of therapy, especially those whose family might struggle to afford it otherwise, she took another step toward her vision: to collaborate with after-school programs — and schools someday — to serve multiple children, one by one, all in one place.
Takes a village
Tracy Grondziowski leads the Children’s Ministry at Allegheny Center Alliance Church on the North Side as she’s done for the past 15 years.
The group’s after-school program serves about 40 kids from two local schools and prides itself on stepping in as trustworthy adults when parents and guardians are at work.
That means helping with homework and guiding friendships and occasionally identifying children in need of professional emotional support.
In her Sunday school programs, she sees pandemicera toddlers “unable to interact with one another” or separate from their parents because COVID-19 restrictions stifled those experiences earlierin their development. She sees anxiety and anger in some younger children that mirrors how adults have felt for the past few years. And there are occasionally cases of children talking about hurting themselves, which is handled with the required seriousness.
“There have been so many times when I’ve urged people to do therapy, and they don’t take advantage of it,” she said. “Sometimes life gets in the way. With therapy, it’s so important to be consistent. To have Doreen do this, it’s going to be so beneficial for the kids.”
But kids won’t be the only group to benefit because Upshaw plans on a second bus, oriented toward adult clients. And the idea is already spreading, as two practitioners — one locally and one in California — have already come under her patent license for access to her mobile therapy center idea.
Wheels of change
Outside the brick and mortar arm of Compass Counseling and Support Services, Upshaw parallel parked her 15seatbus without hesitation.
During her Army career, when she wasn’t relaying secret-level messages, she drove trucks of all shapes and sizes for the good of the larger mission.
At one month shy of age 60, her goals — and her mode of transportation — haven’t much changed much.
“It’s a blessing that this is starting in right here in Pittsburgh,” she said. “Hopefully, years from now, this will spread across the U.S. and will tell others, ‘It’s normal. Comeget your counseling.’
“We all need help. I’m just honored to be the one to talk about it.”