Devon Jones is an MSW, LCSW and peer recovery specialist specializing in mental health and substance abuse disorders. He is currently Director of Operations for Ambulatory Behavioral Health in one of Indiana’s largest behavioral health organizations. He has a passion for leadership and advancing diversity and inclusion both in the field of social work and equity in access in health care overall. LinkedIn profile
MSW Online
Please tell us how you got started in social work.
Devon Jones
Yeah. So I was an at-risk youth myself and struggled with mental health and substance use disorders when I was an older adolescent and was really lost. My family told me to go to college, but I wasn’t sure what I should go to college for. Then I met this wonderful woman who is my wife to this day. We started dating and her mom was a director at a nonprofit who worked with people with developmental disabilities and co-occurring comorbid health issues as well. She was like, “Hey, come do an internship at our organization. I think you’d be great.” So I did, mainly to impress my wife, my girlfriend at the time, but I fell in love with it because I learned as much from the individuals I worked with as they learned from me. I realized how human connection helped people grow. So I worked with people with developmental disabilities and SMI, serious mental illnesses, for about seven years while I was getting my bachelor’s in social work and my master’s in social work.
In short, what got me started in social work was a combination of me being an at-risk youth with my own substance use and mental health challenges, and then having some caring adults take me under their wing that were in social service type roles. I fell in love with helping people meet their own goals in their own unique ways, while learning from them in the process.
MSW Online
Would you say a takeaway from your story is just how much impact someone else can have on the trajectory of someone’s life for the better if they’re struggling? Sometimes our culture pushes one to be so independent or don’t ask for help. But your story and the role of social workers really highlights the importance of connection and finding people that will really care about you and want your future to be better.
Devon Jones
Absolutely. Research shows it just takes one caring adult, and I’m living proof of it.
MSW Online
That’s amazing. So I want to go back to the roles that you had. So if people are still debating on going into social work, like actually in an academic program, what type of role did you have where you were working with people? What are those titles? Are there roles that people could get jobs in while they’re in undergrad or even before they choose an academic program to sort of get a taste of what social work is? And you kind of said it, it helped you fall in love with working with those populations, but what were the actual job titles they can look into?
Devon Jones
Yeah. I have been a direct support professional, case manager/skills clinician, behavior consultant, therapist, supervisor, manager, and director. So when I graduated high school, I was a direct support professional. There’s different titles for that, but typically working with individuals with developmental disabilities, you only need a high school diploma to do the direct service work. That is a really good way because typically if someone has a developmental disability and is in a group home or independent living, they’re going to have a co-occurring disorder. So you get a really well-rounded behavioral health experience while you’re going through college. And it teaches you, if you allow, that each person you work with has something unique to learn from. For me, it showed me that I had just as much to learn from my clients as they had to learn from me…sometimes more.
Then once you graduate with your bachelor’s, you can then move into community mental health and do some of the community-based work for community mental health centers and get that experience. If you go on to get your masters, then you can be an unlicensed therapist and then a clinically licensed therapist. You can work with children and adolescents as life coaches, case managers, or therapists. You can use your skills in clinical leadership. You can also use the skills you learn for roles in Human Resources and other speciality areas.
But to be transparent with you, I’m 32 and I’m in senior leadership at Central Indiana’s largest behavioral health organization. A main reason is that I started when I was 18 and sought feedback at every stage of my education and career. So you hit the nail on the head. It’s finding ways to get that experience as you’re going through college, instead of waiting until afterwards to start that. Seeking mentors in the field and being willing to hear tough, constructive feedback is a must as well.
MSW Online
What an inspiring journey. That helped you figure out the population and the breadth of people that you could support as a social worker too, I bet.
Devon Jones
Absolutely. I think overall it’s helped me see that regardless of what you’re doing in social work typically, and especially in the behavioral health area (that includes child welfare, developmental disability services, mental health, and addiction, even physical health care) we’re all in recovery. Each person has their own unique needs in their own recovery. It may be from diabetes or another health condition. It may be from mental health. It may be from substance use. It may be a combination. Or it may just be learning to live and enjoy life with a disability. So really in the end, it all comes back to, we all have our own unique challenges in life that require some sort of recovery.
MSW Online
Tell me about your current role. What’s your title and what does your day-to-day like?
Devon Jones
Yeah. So right now I’m the director of operations for behavioral health at Community Health Network. I oversee our Access Department, seven outpatient clinics, and SMI services. And over 250 therapists, case managers/skills clinicians, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, nurses, and support staff provide behavioral health treatment through residential, PHP, IOP, and traditional outpatient levels of care for adults and youth.
I am in meetings most of the day. Some are general operational meetings, some are process improvement type meetings, and some are stakeholder meetings. I am usually analyzing data from excel or PowerBI and utilizing project management and relational skills each day to inform decision making. And my favorite activity during the day is when I get to have one-on-one rounding with my managers. Everyday requires prioritization and flexibility.
MSW Online
That is awesome. How has COVID changed how your areas do the work? I guess the better question might be how has it not changed?
Devon Jones
I remember the weekend of the 14th and 15th of March working 16 hour days all weekend long, figuring out how we could do everything safe. It was determined virtual was the safest for our clients and staff and we made it happen within a week. So we played with technology and figured it out. We have groups and individual sessions now virtually. At first, we didn’t know what to expect with the pandemic and with the virus. So we took everything virtual. What we found was our individuals with substance use disorders that needed the IOP level of care weren’t doing very well from an engagement perspective. So then we brought our substance use IOPs back in the clinics and we worked with our infection prevention team to make sure we were taking necessary safety protocols, et cetera.
It’s really made us look at things differently and I think honestly, opened people’s minds to what is possible because when you talk about telehealth in the past, people were like, “No, we can’t do that. We can’t do that.” Now that we had to do it, now everyone’s like, “Actually we can serve a decent portion of our population virtually.” It would never be a hundred percent, but there’s definitely a good portion of the population that we’re serving. In some ways we’re serving the population better from an access standpoint.
MSW Online
Right. Well, and when you think about all of the social determinants of health and challenges that everyone seeking health care could have, transportation being a big one, having to be forced to innovate is one of the good things that came from the pandemic.
Devon Jones
Yeah. Well, and I think transparently, it forced insurance companies because a lot of things in healthcare are driven by what’s reimbursable. Before, telehealth for the most part was not reimbursable from the behavioral health side or it was very cumbersome. You had to use a hub and spoke model. It just didn’t work very well. If insurers go back to that model, if they go back to where they were previously, you’ll see behavioral health retract back to almost a hundred percent face-to-face. But if they can maintain some of what they’ve put in place now, it provides more flexibility. It’s patients first and you’ll see a decent portion or percentage of services remain virtual.
MSW Online
So what advice would you have for people considering social work at this point, from the perspective of what does the future of social work look like and why should they get into it?
Devon Jones
I really feel that getting your MSW sets you up for really almost anything you want to do in social services and in leadership. I don’t think the MSW degree gets enough credit because it teaches you to look at things from a systemic perspective and increases your emotional intelligence. I have plenty of LinkedIn posts that you can review on the similarities between being a clinician and being a leader. But I think if you want to be a leader, the MSW is great.
I appreciate the path that I took and I appreciate where I am now. Working for smaller organizations has some benefits, but I can tell you that getting into a community mental health center or a large organization like Community is very beneficial because there are ample opportunities to learn and grow. There’s so many super smart people that you can learn from.
I think the other advice is, if one area of social work is not working for you, don’t get out of social work altogether. Trust me, I’ve even had my times where I‘ve had friends recruit me to sales because of the relational skills I learned in my MSW. I’ve thought about it. But, ultimately, my goal of building diverse, recovery-oriented organizations and communities didn’t align with sales, so I stayed with my passion. At the end of the day, try out different areas of social work and find the area of social work that meets your needs and where you feel like you can give the most back to society and to the patients you serve, while maintaining balance with your personal life.
I’ve seen some people in social work where they get burnt out on one area and they think, “Well, social work is not for me.” So they go into a completely different field. Sometimes maybe if they’re working in community mental health, maybe they need more of a child welfare type organization or working with people with developmental disabilities. There’s just a large gamut of things that someone can do. Have an open mind and keep learning. The social work degree, well, not just social work, a bachelor’s degree’s half life is four and a half or five years according to research. So if you stop learning and you stop reading, you won’t see growth in your clients or yourself – it doesn’t matter what career you choose.
I read behavioral health and leadership related material for 45-60 minutes each day. I walk/jog on the treadmill and read on my iPad to knock two birds out with one stone. You can read or listen to audio books or podcasts, whatever works for you to keep learning and growing.
MSW Online
That is such important advice. What learning resources are your favorite?
Devon Jones
I’ll tell you it’s a variety of things, but the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell. It really hit home for me because I had made mistakes in the past where my ideas were good, but the timing was wrong. So one of the laws of leadership is everything is based on timing. If you present an idea at the wrong time, then it’s not going to gain the traction needed. It also helps you realize you’re not as good or important as you might think. It helped provide some humility. Radical Candor by Kim Scott is good. Dare to Lead by Brene Brown.
I’ve been reading a ton from SAMHSA (SAMHSA – Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration). They put up tips for evidence-based practice toolkits for anything you can imagine. So being an addictions counselor, supervising, being an addiction supervisor, their EBPs toolkit on crisis continuum, et cetera. Those are always really good to read because they take a lot from the field at large and put it together in one document. So that’s another area.
Then your last question, what does the future of social work look like from your experience? You’re going to have to do co-occurring treatment. So if you’re getting into therapy and you only want to treat mental health or you only want to treat substance use, you’re really pigeonholing yourself and jobs, specialty jobs like that are going away. For instance, at Community Behavioral Health, we are moving in the direction that we expect everyone to be able to provide co-occurring treatment.
MSW Online
How would you define co-occurring treatment?
Devon Jones
Well, it’s where you can treat substance use and mental health together.
To be honest with you, CBT, acceptance and commitment therapy, motivational interviewing, et cetera, you can apply those to substance use and mental health. Research shows that typically 60 to 70% of individuals with substance use disorder also have a mental health disorder, vice versa. So you have to be able to treat both. It doesn’t mean you have to focus solely on treating someone with heroin all the time, but you have to have a good understanding of addiction and what that looks like and be able to treat it in some capacity. So I think that’s huge.
I believe social work is just going to be in a higher demand years to come. I think people are seeing the value in it more and more. To be honest with you, pay is not great, but it’s not bad either. So if you get your master’s degree and you get into a master’s level position, you’re going to make a good living. You’re not going to make an excellent living, but you’re going to be able to provide for your family. And I
don’t think people realize that.
MSW Online
Well and most importantly, you’re doing something you’re passionate about.
Devon Jones
Absolutely. I would say the future of social work is going to require a lot of flexibility. I like getting into the business side of things from a social work perspective, but also have a lot of flexibility and a lot of work with different systems. Integrated health care is going to continue to be a big player. Then telehealth is here to stay in some form. So I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, but telehealth is definitely going to be a big part of the future.
MSW Online
Very cool. Well, is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that came to your mind that you’d like to share with the readers?
Devon Jones
Thanks for asking this. I really believe we have to continue our focus and prioritization of increasing diversity and inclusion. We’re a profession that states that this is a value of ours, yet our programs continue to graduate a very small percentage of black, indigenous, and persons of color. We’ve got to get hyper-focused in that area. That’s just something that I think is really important.
As a certified peer recovery specialist myself, I think that that is a way to start increasing diversity at the high school diploma level. You have to build diversity, not only at the top levels, but from the ground up. You have to show how BIPOC individuals can become a part of your organization and progress in the organization and continuously get pay raises, et cetera, so that they can provide a better life for themselves and their families.
MSW Online
Absolutely. Thank you for sharing your insight on this topic.
Devon Jones
I can talk to you for hours about diversity and inclusion, but as a profession, that’s a value of ours. I think we need to do more. I mean, introspectively, we can say things all we want and we can put out statements all we want, but it’s telling when we’re still graduating a very small percentage.
MSW Online
Well and I think a lot of the readership of this will be professionals in the academic world. I think that is absolutely a call to action and a challenge for them. What are you doing? What processes have you put in place to increase diversity and inclusion in your admittance programs? Share more about peer recovery specialists.
Devon Jones
What better way to build trust with the health care system for black, indigenous, and persons of color than to embed diverse peer recovery specialists who have lived experience with mental health and substance use? Because the reason why certified peer recovery specialists are so powerful when working with people is because there’s that shared feeling that they have somewhat of an idea of what I’m going through, a foundation for trust. Well, when we talk to black, indigenous, and persons of color, we hear the same about working with different professionals in behavioral health and healthcare.
What are social work programs doing to partner with communities of faith and other areas that have that level of trust? Because if you’re just marketing in the same way you market every other day, you’re not actually practicing diversity and inclusion like you need to be. What are social work programs doing to build diversity and inclusion from the ground up?
MSW Online
Thank you so much for sharing your story and perspective!
Devon Jones
Thank you!