770 Gaines School Rd., Suite A, Athens, GA 30605
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770 Gaines School Rd., Suite A, Athens, GA 30605
Creating centers that provide a safe space for people to grow and change
Dr. Kelly Simonson started her career as a psychologist working in college counseling centers and specialized in working with eating disorders, sexual trauma and the LGBTQ+ population. She quickly found that there is a great deal of overlap between these issues and students who needed extra help getting through college and needed help navigating the college administrative process when they needed to withdraw from school. Additionally, through Dr. Simonson’s work with two eating disorder intensive outpatient programs (IOPs), she realized that the care for college students needed to be improved, especially in college towns far from a big city.
In 2022, Brad Guest approached Dr. Simonson with some questions as a parent of a child with an eating disorder. He had ideas about eating disorder treatment in Georgia and the lack of adequate resources for his daughter. Brad Guest is a business consultant focused on health care companies and brought some vital vision to what could be. That initial discussion led to many more discussions and soon we were brainstorming about an IOP program in Athens and beyond.
Our vision is to create centers that provide a safe space for people to grow and change. We want to create an IOP program that is specifically designed for college students by therapists who really understand the unique needs of college students as well as understand the university systems in which they are living. We work with other campus mental health professionals and administrators to help students, design IOP programs that fit around college student schedules, and have special programs to help offer support during summer and semester breaks.
On the spectrum of therapists from all heart to all head, I am right in the middle. I believe it is my job to offer a warm, nurturing environment where you will feel truly heard and listened to but also an environment where you feel appropriately challenged. I will push you to live your life authentically and in ways that are the best fit for you. I will help you discover how to live the life you really want to live, not the life you or other people think “you should”.
I have worked in the healthcare industry for thirty years. But my work there was only professional. I helped clients solve problems and often create new things. We planned and built hospitals, surgery centers, medical groups, health plans and the like. Several years ago, however, things became very personal. When my oldest daughter developed an eating disorder, my wife and I didn’t know what to do. I looked at the services available to her not as a consultant but as a parent. She needed things that didn’t yet exist. Her disorder was strong and persistent. It was tough to treat and hard for us to understand. We didn’t know what to do, so we got input from many people, including her physician. Dr. Simonson was the first person we found who understood eating disorders. For our daughter that made all the difference. She is in college now and has made great progress in her recovery. College is a unique time. So much can go right and so much can go wrong. Our daughter was the inspiration to develop a unique program specially designed for college students. Dr. Simonson was committed to the same thing. She had the same goals and just needed a path and a way. That’s what Capstone is.