Melinda Holliday, LMSW, CAADC

I have wanted to help people for as long as I can remember, and for a while I assumed that meant medicine. In college I found psychology, and I shifted to behavioral health. Inspiring mentors helped me along the way and pointed me toward parts of this work I didn’t know I would love as much as I do. Seventeen years later, I am still learning from the people I work alongside and the people I serve.

I hold a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Albion College and a master’s degree in social work from Western Michigan University. I started as a certified nursing assistant in a care home. Since then my work has included inpatient psychiatric care, community mental health, outpatient mental health and addiction treatment, crisis care, clinical training, and supervision. Several of those years were in a hospital system, working alongside physicians and nurses on psychiatric inpatient units and in the emergency department.

For several years I worked on a community crisis team, and part of each week was spent embedded with a police department. Some days that meant riding along with Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) officers. Other days it meant helping with people the community saw often, or with situations that needed a clinician on scene. That time, some of it spent in a fusion center, a shared office where police, other agencies, and community partners work side by side, changed how I do crisis work, and it taught me a great deal about the culture of the people who take those calls and about the community I served. Starting in 2016, I helped with the first CIT training in the county where I worked, and since then I have helped run CIT trainings in Michigan and in other states, including trainings for dispatchers, firefighters, and EMS. In 2019, CIT Michigan named me Clinician of the Year.

Training and supervision are a large part of my work. For the past ten years I have developed and delivered training for clinicians, law enforcement, and other first responders, in Michigan and around the country, including crisis-response curricula for clinicians. I have supervised clinicians working toward independent licensure and hold the supervisory designation in Ohio. Teaching other professionals to do this work well is part of how I stay current.

Outside work, I love traveling around Michigan in the summer, and northern Michigan is a particular favorite. I enjoy traveling internationally too. I read constantly, memoirs most of all. And I fly. I had always been interested in aviation, with nobody in my family in it, and in 2017 I decided I had run out of excuses, booked a discovery flight, and came home and signed up for lessons. I learned in a Cessna 150 with private instructors, changed airports and airplanes along the way, earned my private pilot certificate in a Cessna 172, and flew with a club until recently. I hold my own FAA Medical and fly recreationally. What I love about it is the challenge of learning something hard, and the adventure.