Clinical Director Tessa Sterling on OCD, Access to Care & the Campus Concept

Tessa and Frenchie Douglas in their free time.
Tessa Sterling graduated from Michigan State University with a bachelor’s degree in social work. Afterward, she moved to Chicago to get her master’s in social work with a specialization in mental health in the advanced standing program at Loyola University. Tessa has a wide range of experience in the mental health field. She has worked across residential, PHP, and IOP levels of care, specializing in the comorbidities of eating disorders and OCD. Tessa has a strong passion for the treatment of OCD, eating disorders, and substance use, as she sees so many crossovers in these populations. As Clinical Director, Tessa brings empathy, openness, and a passion for clinical mentoring and training. We sat down with her to talk about OCD, access to care, and the campus concept at Sanford Behavioral Health.
Clinical Director Tessa Sterling on OCD, Access to Care & the Campus Concept
LIMELIGHT INTERVIEW
Sanford Behavioral Health Clinical Director Tessa Sterling, LMSW
“I want Sanford to be a place where, if you had a family member or a friend who needed mental health treatment, you would think of us as the best of the best in therapeutic support.”
SBH: What is your job at Sanford Behavioral Health?
Tessa: I am still learning what my job entails. A few months ago, I came to Sanford Behavioral Health as the Clinical Director. My vision and goals are to increase access to care for our patients. This includes decreasing the time from the first call to getting in the door and increasing access to specialized services and high-integrity therapeutic supports. There are many hospital-based programs out there that see patients for day programming (PHP and IOP), and that’s great. However, I want Sanford to be a place where, if you had a family member or a friend who needed mental health treatment, you would think of us as the best of the best in terms of therapeutic support. With a continuum of care and the campus concept, we can provide a full range of services.
SBH – How are you defining your role as Clinical Director?
Tessa: From a clinical perspective, I want to make sure that our therapists are practicing DBT the way it’s intended. Really making sure we’re in alignment with the best evidence-based practices. I’m also someone who likes to look at the data: where do we see our symptom reduction? How many days are clients attending a residential level of care? How can I support the growth of our existing programs? We use data-driven tools to guide our clinical recommendations and help legitimize the behavioral health profession, but there is still a stigma around receiving treatment.
SBH – What is your short-term focus?
Tessa: We’ll focus on expanding primary mental health programming, likely day and partial-day programs. Then, embedded within mental health, we can provide specialized tracks for folks with OCD, trauma, and other conditions. I want to expand on who we treat while increasing the integrity of the service along the way.
SBH – You have a background in OCD treatment. Could you talk about that, please?
Tessa: My passion for OCD comes from the Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) work I learned within the context of eating disorders. OCD and anxiety-based disorders have prevalent comorbidity with eating disorders, and I was trained in practice to integrate ERP into eating disorder treatment. I think that’s a huge area where Stanford can grow. In my previous position, I was recruited to develop exposure and anxiety-based programming for our under-18-year-old programs. I specialized in diagnostic assessments using the YALE-BROWN OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE SCALE (Y-BOCS).
Often, children would come into treatment as “unwilling” or “disruptive,” and we’d get to the bottom of it and they were having intrusive, harmful thoughts or parts of their school were “contaminated.” I developed group-based programming for ERP and staff training on parent psychoeducation. An OCD diagnosis is important to help with the stigma, self-judgment, and shame that is associated with a lot of these symptoms.
At Sanford Behavioral Health, I want to ensure that we screen our patients for OCD when they come in for mental health programming or school refusal. We must also be diligent about obtaining accurate diagnostic information and providing ERP every day. We’re going to do an exposure over and over and over again until we see decreased anxiety levels. OCD is a passion of mine, and I would like to see an OCD-specific program at Sanford; there is so much need! In the meantime, we’ll work on how we can integrate more ERP into our eating disorder programming.
SBH – How did you get into this line of work and come to Sanford Behavioral Health?
Tessa: I’m licensed in the state of Illinois and now in Michigan, and I actually just fell into this work. I am from Grand Rapids, but I lived in Chicago for the past nine years. My move back to the area was prompted by wanting to be closer to family. I would say that many personal reasons drew me to this field. I grew up in a chaotic environment. My parents were divorced. I saw everyone around me just really struggling to function. My youngest brother completed substance use treatment in California. I saw the impact of addiction on our entire family. I often think about each member of my family and what their life would have been like had they had access to care. Where would we all be now?
When I was very, very little, my mom worked in group homes with adults with schizophrenia, and I was fascinated by the stories. In addition, I really connected with my middle school and high school guidance counselor. She is a therapist in the area and does a lot of crisis work with high schools when there’s a suicide or a big event. She was someone who supported me throughout my formative years. And now, we are connected as colleagues, and she is a mentor to me. Having access to her in my school and the spaces where I needed to have a consistent, stable adult was really impactful for me. The rest just fell into place. I love working with people and providing the support they need!
SBH – How does your experience fit with Sanford’s mission?
Tessa: My career also led me here. I got my master’s at Loyola and specialized in mental health. For the first few years, I worked in inpatient psychiatric hospitals, mostly with adults. During this time, I learned a lot about medications and case management. I worked at the largest psychiatric hospital in the Chicagoland area. I saw so much high need and gained experience working within a system where I wished I could do more.
While I was working in hospitals, I’d pick up shifts in the residential units for eating recovery. I eventually transitioned to a full-time therapist, on the eating disorder unit. But I got experience with just about every population, from geriatric to family to eating disorders.
SBH – What is the fun part of your job at Sanford?
Tessa: I would say the fun part of my job is moving into this next phase of my career. I want to support newer clinicians and staff who are experiencing this field for the first time. I like the clinical mentoring and training side and working to support therapists in achieving longevity in their careers. How can we keep them going and engaged? I also think it’s a privilege to see people in their most vulnerable moments and who are in the process of changing their lives. It’s profound and impactful! I’m genuinely excited to go to work every day and get to see patients, work with staff, and be in the helping profession.
SBH – What about the challenging part?
Tessa: The challenging part, which I don’t always love, is navigating some of the systemic barriers to patients’ access to care. Accessing care is not realistic for many people. It is important to propel the industry forward by partnering with insurance companies and reviewing contracts. I appreciate my colleagues who work hard to support these goals at Sanford.
SBH – Do you have a motto?
Tessa: Yes. I say, “If we at Sanford are not going to take a chance on treating this patient, then who will?” I strive to model that all patients deserve access to care. I work with our admissions and treatment teams to answer that question. If the answer is “no one,” what can we do to get creative about getting them access to the care that they need?
SBH – Could you talk about Sanford West Behavioral Health Campus and the “campus concept”?
Tessa: When I’m working with newer clinicians, I always ask them, “What need is being met through the symptoms we are seeing on the surface?” Whether it’s substance use, an eating disorder, or a mental health diagnosis, the client’s needs are being “met.” So, the behavioral health campus supports the vision of retraining the brain to identify the need and find a more adaptive, safer way of satisfying it. We must have a lot of empathy and understanding that these symptoms don’t appear overnight and they are survival mechanisms.
Asking our clients to try something different can feel scary and painful. For example, we might see that an eating disorder is in remission, but there are increased urges for substance use or self-harm as a way to cope. The term is called “behavior swapping”. So, we might see one behavior decrease and another pop-up. Having all of our services on one campus allows us to triage and get our patients access to the most appropriate service under one roof. We do not have to send them elsewhere if behavior swapping occurs.
The collaborative care team is open and direct. We have meetings every morning, and we all have a unique skill set that we bring to the team. We make space for providers, dietitians, therapists, and residential support staff to share what they are seeing. Downtime in every program area is a time that is rich in clinical observation. What are we learning about these patients? With collaboration, our decisions are not just reflective of one perspective. Decisions take into account the other disciplines, the work they’re doing, and how we can all support the patient.
We look at each patient as a whole, including their life, systems, job, partner, and passions, and make a plan tailored to their needs.
SBH – You worked at the largest psychiatric hospital in the Chicagoland area; how does Sanford differ?
Tessa: One of the things I love about working at Sanford is the personable touch. We are not a huge corporation and are still in a space where everyone knows each other’s names. I can pop into the substance use disorder area and know our patients by name. We involve the families in treatment. There is a feeling of safety and connection here that you do not feel in a large institution. I think we do a good job of giving patients opportunities to involve their support systems. Sanford can make decisions and policy changes quickly – the culture is flexible. We try to put ourselves in our patient’s shoes and think about what we would want for our loved ones if they entered treatment.
That is a beautiful place to end. Thank you, Tessa!
If you or a loved one is struggling with addiction, eating disorders, or co-occurring mental health conditions, donโt wait to change your life. Click the link below to speak with a Sanford Behavioral Health admissions specialist today.