Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Daniel van Beek

“I think teaching allows us to be impactful on folks in moments when they have this great openness to being supported and mentored,” explained Dr. Daniel van Beek, a professor in the Wright Institute’s Clinical Psychology program. “If I can have a positive impact on students going forward, I'll be very satisfied with my career.” Dr. van Beek has had an accomplished career thus far and we’re excited to see what he brings to the Wright Institute in his new role as a Full-time Institute Faculty member.

Dr. van Beek spent his childhood with his parents and younger brother in Southeast Asia, primarily in Indonesia, but also in Thailand and Singapore. His father, who is of Dutch descent, and his mother, who is of Chinese and Vietnamese descent, were missionaries there and Dr. van Beek really appreciated growing up abroad. Later, the family moved to Sacramento, California, to be closer to family. “I spent a lot of my teen years and pre-teen years trying to understand American culture and feeling a little bit like an observer of people and culture around me,” he recalled. He developed an interest in human behavior, in hopes that understanding the way others behaved would help him fit in.

For his undergraduate studies, Dr. van Beek attended the University of California at Davis, where he earned his BA in psychology with a minor in Asian American Studies. As is the case for many people who enter the field of psychology, Dr. van Beek had been told by others that he was a good listener and easy to talk to. “I went into undergrad thinking ‘I don't really know exactly what I want to do, but people have told me that I should check this out’ and so I did,” he reflected. “I think, by luck and happenstance, I ended up really liking it.” Dr. van Beek was extremely interested in his psychology coursework at UC Davis and felt that his background made him uniquely suited for this work. “The skill and humility of acknowledging that you are entering into a space in which maybe you don't understand the culture or the personal background of somebody is really valuable to a psychologist,” he shared. “Like many folks, I had the experience of not understanding the people around me, so I learned that lesson pretty early and I think that's really useful in the field.”

In 2010, Dr. van Beek enrolled at the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) at Alliant International University in San Francisco. He decided to pursue his doctorate in psychology instead of a master’s degree in order to provide himself with as many options in the future as possible. “I saw psychologists doing a million different things with their careers,” he recalled. “As a really indecisive kid fresh out of college, I liked the idea of not having to lock in specifically to any one career path.”

Dr. van Beek’s first practicum experience in graduate school was at Community Health for Asian Americans in Oakland, CA. “I picked Community Health for Asian Americans because I had an interest in working with my own community,” he reflected. “I learned so much that year about what the actual work of therapy is, but it was also a crash course on how environmental factors and issues of background and identity affected these kids’ mental health.” Despite the organization’s name, Dr. van Beek was working with clients from many ethnicities and he noted the impact of cultural views, socioeconomic factors, and individual attitudes on his clients’ willingness and ability to participate in therapy. Dr. van Beek remembers being terrified as he began this first practicum placement, but he is eternally grateful for the excellent supervisors who guided him as he found his footing.

During his second year at CSPP, Dr. van Beek’s practicum was at Ohlhoff Recovery Programs in San Francisco. Like many clinicians, he was initially hesitant to work with substance abusers and folks in recovery. “It’s a difficult population primarily because we're trying to get them to stop doing something that they really like doing that happens to be hurting them and their families and their loved ones,” he shared, “but what I saw was a lot of people who were making this huge sacrifice of something that they had found to be of some benefit to their lives, either in recreation or functioning, in order to support their own well-being and the well-being of the people around them and I found that really inspiring.” Dr. van Beek’s favorite part of working with patients in recovery is how quickly you see a change in them once treatment begins. “When they're using drugs and alcohol excessively, they're often not drinking water or taking care of themselves, and the moment they start to get sober, they start doing those things and then they become themselves.” he explained. “I would always tell my patients that I feel like I don't really meet them until two weeks in when they’re starting to feel like themselves again.” After his practicum was complete, Dr. van Beek stayed on at Ohlhoff for an additional year as a Master’s Level On-Call Counselor because he enjoyed the work so much and wanted more experience working with that population.

In his final year at CSPP, Dr. van Beek completed his predoctoral internship at Kaiser Permanente Walnut Creek Mental Health in their Chemical Dependency Department, where he has his first experience working as a full-time therapist. “One of the things I learned from working at Walnut Creek, as a trainee and later a staff member, was that teamwork is essential when you’re working with a population where there is high complexity and need,” he recalled. “I learned just what could be achieved by a team that was really collaborative, supportive, and compassionate towards each other.” This is where Dr. van Beek also had his first experience providing supervision to practicum students, which he really enjoyed. “That felt very fulfilling in many ways,” he shared. “It taught me how much I enjoy mentorship and coaching and supporting others.” From that point onward, Dr. van Beek made it one of his career goals to be a supervisor.

Dr. van Beek’s doctoral dissertation was titled “Demographic Markers, Internet Usage, and Psychological Well-being as Predictors of Openness to Telepsychology.” This topic was inspired by his time at Community Health for Asian-Americans, where he learned that the use of phone calls, texts, and email helped him maintain consistent communication with his clients. “I was particularly interested in studying how we could open things up, particularly for individuals who come from ethnic groups and cultures where therapy is discouraged through cultural norms and there’s more hesitance to seek treatment,” he explained. “The findings of my study were specifically that Latinx and Asian folks were much more likely to engage with therapy if they were offered teletherapy options either as the sole means of therapy or in addition to their therapy.” The ability to engage in therapy from the privacy of their homes was particularly appealing to these individuals who faced anxiety surrounding in-person therapy. A few years later, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. van Beek was able to see his research in action on a larger scale as there was a huge increase in the diversity of folks seeking therapy once teletherapy became widely available.

After graduating from CSPP in 2015, Dr. van Beek completed his postdoctoral residency at Kaiser Permanente Elk Grove Psychiatry Department. After several years of working in substance abuse treatment, he purposely chose something very different for his postdoc to see how it compared to his previous experiences. “It taught me a lot about being independent because, when you’re a solo provider, your patients are yours and yours alone and you have to be more on top of designing treatment plans and setting a course for your patients,” he reflected. “It also taught me about owning my professional identity and finding my way through the imposter syndrome, which is really challenging in its own right.” Dr. van Beek found that he really enjoyed general psychiatry, but that he missed being part of a team and facilitating group therapy, which are often components of substance abuse treatment.

When he was nearing the end of his postdoc, Dr. van Beek heard that Kaiser Permanente Walnut Creek Addiction Medicine and Recovery Services was hiring, so he jumped at the opportunity and was hired first as a psychological assistant, then as a clinical psychologist. At Walnut Creek, Dr. van Beek was given a lot of freedom to redesign elements of their program, which quickly built his confidence as a member of the team. “As much as I adored the team, it was pretty homogenous at the time and I found that part of my role there was to be a minority voice in a room that did not have many minority voices in it,” he recalled. “I think that’s where I really came into my own as an equal professional on the team.” This also inspired Dr. van Beek to join their Equity, Inclusion and Diversity Committee and work to address microaggressions and inequities in the workplace by leading training sessions for the staff and holding office hours to address issues of multicultural competency.

In 2019, just after getting licensed, Dr. van Beek became a clinical supervisor in the Predoctoral Internship Training Program at Kaiser Permanente Walnut Creek. Since his first experience during his internship days, Dr. van Beek had been eager to get back into supervision. “After several years of doing the work, it's easy to become complacent in your learning or to take the work for granted,” he shared. “It was really helpful for me to work with people who were still really excited to be therapists and really just in love with this weird, wild job that we all picked.” In 2021, just as Dr. van Beek began wondering what was next for him and looking for more leadership opportunities, he was offered the role of Training Director for the Internship in Clinical Psychology program, which he nervously accepted. “I learned a lot about leadership and all of the different factors that one has to balance when being a leader,” he reflected. “I remember every intern I had over the course of those years of supervising and training directing and those interactions and professional relationships are just still really dear to me.”

Through his experience as a training director, Dr. van Beek realized that his favorite elements of the job were mentoring support and group supervision. When he thought about what was next for him, he realized that teaching would be an excellent opportunity to continue mentoring the next generation of therapists. “I had a lot of experience with Wright Institute students through the training program and I always enjoyed the way they talked about the coursework and the culture of the school,” he recalled. “It sounded like a good place to work and the students from the Wright had always been bright and engaged and very connected to issues of social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion, things that really align with my personal approach.” When he heard that the Wright Institute was hiring, he applied and was specifically interested in the opportunity to teach about substance abuse. Dr. van Beek joined the Wright Institute family as an adjunct professor in the Clinical Psychology program in the fall of 2024. “The moment I started teaching, I realized I was at the right place,” he shared proudly.

In the short time he’s been at the Wright Institute, Dr. van Beek has already taught Sociocultural Issues, Chemical Dependency Seminar I, Intervention: Brief Therapy, Chemical Dependency Seminar II, Psychopharmacology, and Clinicians to Society. “At the beginning of every class, I like to say that this isn’t about me having more experience, it’s about all of us having different experiences, so I walk away from every class having learned quite a bit,” he admitted. “I think that makes me a better clinician and a better therapist.” As he steps into his new role as a member of the Full-Time Institute Faculty at the Wright Institute, Dr. van Beek is excited for what this new role brings. “I'm really excited to be teaching more classes to be involved with chairing dissertations and just to have more engagement with students,” he shared. “My interactions with students have been overwhelmingly positive and I feel very energized by that.” Dr. van Beek is also excited to take more of a role in the school’s mission of educating clinicians to society and learning more through the process.

Dr. van Beek’s advice for students in the Clinical Psychology Program is to remember the importance of self-care and prioritizing their own needs. “I think that we often forget about the individual toll the work can take because we're holding a lot and we're interacting with folks at really difficult times in their lives,” he explained. “In the same way that a musician has to take care of their instrument or a craftsperson has to take care of their tools, we are our instrument and we are our own tools to do the work, so we have to manage and take care of ourselves.” As an instructor, he reinforces this in class, frequently checking in with students about what forms of self-care they have engaged in during a given week. “Graduate studies is a marathon not a sprint,” he reminds students. “You have to take good care of yourself along the way and sometimes that means things will move a little slower than you planned or that you will need to take a little extra time for yourself on top of what you planned, but I think that's really vital and important.”

In his free time, Dr. van Beek makes sure to engage in his own self-care practices. For over twenty years, he has coached and taught Kendo, a Japanese martial art similar to fencing. “I’ve entered the stage in my martial arts career where I’m mostly getting beat up by college students while I coach them,” he laughed. Dr. van Beek also loves going to see live music performances, learning and playing instruments at home, and going rock climbing with friends.

Looking back on his career thus far, Dr. van Beek is most proud of his work as a supervisor. “I feel very confident that every individual that I've supervised will either make a very great therapist or psychologist or they already are,” he proudly shared. “While they may forget me one day, I like to think that I played a small role in helping them get to that place where they could be so great at what they do and I have a little bit of pride in the way that they are able to help every individual that they help.” As he settles into his new role at the Wright Institute, he hopes to continue influencing the next generation of clinicians.