From saving lives to saving entire psychiatric programs, Julia Stephens is no stranger to dire situations. Be it a personal crisis or a financial one, she’s been called upon to go above and beyond throughout her career. She’s managed a huge array of support, psychiatric, and therapy programs, tackling psychological issues from almost every angle. She’s specialized in music and art therapy, overseen a variety of programs dedicated to quality of life among seniors, and currently serves as Executive Director of CrisisLink, a hotline which responds to callers in desperate situations, many of them suicide-related. She has dedicated her career to forging pathways of hope where there were none, seeing no lost causes and no dead ends.
Despite her wide-ranging successes, it is a program which could not maintain funding that marked the defining moment of her career. It was the first time she began to move outside of her role as a practitioner to take on the challenge of administration and management, ultimately transforming her goals and ambitions and providing a learning experience that guided her professional decisions from that point forward.
It was the late 1980s, and Julia was working at the Santa Fe Hospital in Kansas as a music and activity therapist. She began developing an in-patient psychiatric unit for seniors that also provided medical care, an innovation that she describes as, at the time, very cutting edge. “Psychiatric and medical problems really overlap and interplay in the senior population,” Julia explains. “You have to go in-depth to assess whether an elderly person is depressed, or instead showing symptoms of dementia.” From her role as a practitioner, she rose to be director of the program, supervising doctors, social workers, and nurses as they transformed the terrain of health care by offering an effective, inspired alternative to the dismissive treatment seniors received elsewhere.
Despite the program’s groundbreaking success, the hospital relied on Medicare as its sole funding stream—a reality that soon forced it to declare bankruptcy and reorganize. It chose to close the medical side of the hospital and maintain their psychiatric center—a move which proved to be a huge setback for everyone. “They closed the medical side and didn’t stop to think about the fact that psychiatric patients need a pharmacy,” Julia remarks. “They closed the lab where they did the blood work.”
With these changes, the management of the psychiatric program worked overtime to restore the cancelled services to their patients. Charged with getting the lab back up and running, Julia learned more than her fair share about reagents and testing as she successfully returned the facility to its former functionality, only to be told, finally, that the entire hospital would have to shutter. “It was very painful,” she remembers. “After all that energy and effort put into saving the hospital, we had to shut it down and find new hospitals for our patients. We had developed this program that had a huge impact, and to close it down was very devastating.” The incident stuck with her, and Julia has since dedicated her career to managing, building, and maintaining successful programs with diversified funding sources. “From that point on, I have always made it my business to make sure a project has multiple funding sources so that, if the service is valuable, it can continue no matter what,” she avows.
Today, Julia brings that resolve and passion to CrisisLink, a business begun in 1969 and maintained today on what she calls “the proverbial shoestring budget”—about $650,000 annually—along with the generosity of many well-trained volunteers. Launched by a group of dedicated individuals in Arlington, Virginia, who were concerned about local youth, CrisisLink has expanded exponentially over the decades since. Now a 24/7 hotline, it answered 37,000 calls last year alone, and 7 thousand of those were suicide-related.
Effective and free, CrisisLink is accredited by the American Association of Suicidology and certified as a crisis hotline. Of the suicide-related calls it receives, 93 percent of callers are no longer thinking of killing themselves by the end of the call. CrisisLink volunteers help callers develop a safety plan and identify resources in their area to help them. The other 7 percent of callers need emergency intervention, and in those instances, 911 is called. Due to the complicated and serious nature of such calls, volunteers participate in an intense training program that consists of 60 hours of education, including role playing and on-the-job-training, followed by a minimum commitment of 150 hours on the hotline.
Julia has nothing but praise for the CrisisLink volunteers who make the organization possible. “They’re making a huge commitment to really save lives, and we’re incredibly proud of them and what they do,” she says. “Crisis hotlines have been around for about 50 years and have been very well-researched. It’s proven that these models are effective—they do save lives, and they do help people through what is generally a very brief, although quite difficult, period.”
Since the economic downturn in particular, CrisisLink has seen a surge in the number of calls, and in a society that still stigmatizes mental illness and suicide, the hotline is a resource used by many who are too afraid to seek help elsewhere. Julia has been with CrisisLink since 2011, when she left her position with the AARP Foundation, but has dedicated her entire career to psychiatric help for those in need. Her experience as an administrator over the years, including her work with a call center program during her time at AARP, made her the ideal candidate to take on the challenge of Crisis Link.
Born and raised in St. Louis, Julia remembers aspiring to be a music therapist at a young age. The field combined two qualities her family emphasized at home—an appreciation for the arts, and an enthusiasm for helping others. She was the youngest of three, and all three children were taught to love music and visual arts by their parents. Their mother, a stay-at-home mom and artist, explored many mediums with them as they grew, including portrait painting, watercolors, and later, silk painting. Their father, an aeronautical engineer, constantly bombarded them with music. “My dad always had public radio playing classical music when he was working,” Julia remembers. “And he loved musicals, so that was everywhere in my house. I grew up very musically trained on the piano and the guitar. In high school, when I found out there was such a thing as musical therapy, I knew it was something I’d love.”
Julia also cared for the elderly at a young age. Her maternal grandparents and her mother’s aunt lived nearby, and the family would visit them weekly. Later, when Julia’s grandfather got sick, she would go daily. When he passed away, her grandmother and great-aunt moved in with the family, and Julia helped care for them throughout her high school years. She also worked at a local retirement home through college.
Julia’s approach to life embodies the influence of both of her parents. Her father, an accomplished engineer with McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing), worked in the space industry just as it got off the ground, so to speak. He helped develop Gemini, Apollo, and finally the space shuttle, and his talent for engineering carried over into everyday life. “He could build just about anything, from restoring old cars to constructing the pool table in our basement,” she recalls. From him, she inherited an orderly, analytical mind with a talent for creating. From her mother, conversely, she got her creativity and her ability to look at a problem from both new and unique angles.
After high school, Julia left her childhood home in Missouri to attend college at Kansas University. There, she earned her bachelor’s degree in Music Therapy and then took an internship at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, a wonderful opportunity to learn at a vast and respected organization which Julia calls “the Mayo Clinic of psychiatry.” Her internship ultimately turned into a full-time position, and during her time with the Clinic, she also met Eric, a Marriage & Family Therapist, now her husband of 28 years. After a few years there, she returned to school for her Master’s Degree in Music Therapy, then moved on to the Santa Fe Hospital to help them open up their geriatric unit.
The hospital’s heart wrenching closure coincided with a new opportunity for Eric, now a Ph.D., as a professor at Purdue University in Indiana. After a few years there, another, more appealing position opened up at Virginia Tech. It was a step up professionally for her husband, and close to Julia’s sister and parents, who now lived in the DC area as well. The couple moved to Falls Church, VA, and have been there since.
Freshly settled in Virginia, Julia began running an adult daycare center—a day program for seniors—in Northwest DC. The seniors had a wide range of medical issues, and the center, with a nurse on staff, would support them during the day and take them on outings around the city. After that, Julia took a job with the Northern Virginia Family Service (NVFS), a regional social service agency, where she oversaw therapeutic programs including family and individual counseling, counseling in the home, and therapeutic foster care for foster children with emotional disturbances. She grew within the organization and began helping with NVFS’s Quality Improvement, strengthening the organization’s performance by measuring outcomes, determining best practices, and managing risk.
From there, she went on to the AARP Foundation. “It was my first real foray into national programming for seniors,” Julia explains. “AARP helped me grow even more, to the point that I was supervising some legal programs, training attorneys in elder care, and working on elder law.” Although she wasn’t a subject matter expert for that program, or many of the programs she oversaw, the underlying ability that led her to success was her proficiency in program management—the ability to grow and administer them successfully. Given her diverse background, CrisisLink was correctly confident she could apply those winning abilities to their purposes.
“I try to encourage self-sufficiency,” she explains of her leadership style. “There are 99 ways to solve a problem, and to me, that means that while I will have an idea about how to solve a problem, or 2 or 3 or 4 ideas, and while some of them will be good, my staff will have good ideas too. If I ask them what they think or tell them to solve the problem, they’re going to be much more invested and will feel better about it than if I were to solve it for them. Try to engage people in the process, and they will own the results and be a part of the change.” Julia attempts to consistently apply this philosophy to her volunteers, whom, she is quick to note, are not there to do busy work. They are capable and want to effect real change, and she strives to provide that possibility.
As Julia works to shore up funding for CrisisLink so that it can continue the critical support it provides in peoples’ darkest hours, she continues her lifelong passion for the art world by focusing her personal charitable interests upon the funding of arts programs in schools, along with support for food kitchens and shelters. And in looking toward the future, she has advice both practical and philosophical for young people entering the working world today. First, she urges youth to begin saving money right away—even $25 a month will make a difference in the long term. Just as importantly, she emphasizes volunteering. “Find something you’re interested in, or you don’t know about and want to learn about,” she urges. “Be a part of your community and work to make it better. You’ll form lifelong friendships and networks that you’ll never regret. We can all give back.” As the living manifestation of this creed, Julia has spent her life giving back in myriad ways to those in desperate straits. For her, there has never been a project too ambitious, a patient too desperate, or a cause too lost.
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