Will Canu | ADHD in College: Research, Realities and Resources

Appalachian Excellence

On this episode, we explore the research and initiatives of Dr. Will Canu, a clinical psychologist and professor at Appalachian State University, focusing on ADHD, particularly in college students. Dr. Canu discusses ADHD's characteristics, challenges with self-diagnosis driven by social media, and his innovative intervention, "Thriving in College with ADHD," a skills training program designed to aid students in managing ADHD symptoms. The episode also highlights the Appalachian Adult ADHD Lab's research and collaborations, the unique structure of the university's PsyD program, and its mission to address rural mental health needs. Dr. Canu's work aims to bridge gaps in ADHD support and education, emphasizing accessibility and evidence-based strategies.

Show Notes

Connect with Dr. Will Canu:

[e-mail]

Links

Appalachian Adult ADHD Lab

Transcript

Fletcher:

Welcome to Appalachian Excellence, a show where we feature Appalachian State University research, scholarship, and creative activity that creates solutions and inspires change. We're here to bring you stories of incredible work happening right here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I'm your host, Karen Fletcher, where my day job has me working in the Office of Research and Innovation here at App State. And I've got my producer, Dave Blanks, in the studio with me. Hey, Dave.

Blanks:

Hey, Karen. What's up? How's it going?

Fletcher:

Oh, it's going well. I'm excited to introduce our guest today, Dr. Will Canu, the Appalachian State University 2024 Provost Awardee for Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity. Dr. Canu is a licensed clinical psychologist and professor in the Appalachian State University's Department of Psychology and the affiliated Doctor Of Psychology Program, also known as PsyD. He earned his PhD in clinical psychology in 2004 from the University of Texas at Austin and was an assistant professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology before coming to App State in 2007. While at App State, he has served impressively in one summer as a director of the Appalachian Loft in New York City and also led and taught a group of psychology majors abroad at Keele University in Northern England in the fall of 2015. The main topic of Dr. Canu's research is attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or ADHD. He has published over 50 articles, several chapters, and two books in this area, including an intervention that is aimed to help college students with ADHD to succeed. Dr. Canu lives in Boone with his family. Hello, Will.

Canu:

Hey, how's it going, Karen?

Fletcher:

It's going great. Thanks so much for coming out today.

Canu:

Yeah. Sure. My pleasure.

Fletcher:

Before we dive into your intervention that I'm very interested to hear about, can you tell our audience a little bit about ADHD and how it afflicts those who have it?

Canu:

Sure. Yeah. ADHD is a relatively common psychological disorder that emerges in childhood and adolescence. The core characteristics of ADHD really are inattention and hyperactivity. Although, in addition to that, one of the things that's become more and more known about it is that it's also associated with a kind of emotional dysregulation. ADHD is something that affects about 5 to 8% is a fairly conservative estimate of children and adolescents in the United States and it's a disorder that persists longer than a lot of people really realize. For a long time, ADHD was thought of as kind of terminating in adolescence, but the more that we've learned about it, the more we know that this is something that for many people affects them across their entire lives. So when you think about the population of adults in the United States, it may be 4 or 5% overall that might meet criteria for the disorder.

Fletcher:

So when you say that starts in adolescence, is that something where the adults would just continue through adulthood or is that something where they may develop it in adulthood?

Canu:

That's a really good question and it's actually a source of some controversy nowadays. In the last decade or so, there have been several papers that on the one hand suggested maybe ADHD is something that could start for people in adulthood, and then on the other hand, reviewing the evidence that suggests that really that's not the case. And the way things have fallen with that is that the broad consensus is that ADHD is something that begins in childhood for people. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders actually says that the symptoms need to have been present before age 12, but some people don't meet the necessary number of symptoms at that age. They become more prominent as they get older, so you definitely have people who are in their late teens, early 20s, even later, who are getting diagnosed with ADHD. But in those cases, there is evidence that you can look back and collect that they did have those symptoms as a child. They just weren't impaired by it at that point.

Fletcher:

Interesting. When I was doing a little research to prepare for this, my computer obviously understood that and later on, an article popped up about how this is a trending diagnosis on TikTok even, that there's more awareness around it. So this article was saying that more and more people are self-diagnosing once they hear more about the symptoms.

Canu:

Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's a real phenomenon, Karen. I do want to, I guess, be cautious about it because the whole phenomenon of self-diagnosis is something that's really hard to estimate in terms of how much that's happening because people don't tend to go around and talk to people like me and say, "Hey, I've self-diagnosed." Oh, okay. Let me make a tally mark here and I'll keep track of how many people are self-diagnosing. However, it really does seem to be a phenomenon that is one of the dark side of the internet phenomenon, where you can go and get information just about anything without necessarily understanding in as much detail as you need to to then make a conclusion, oh, yes, I have ADHD. It's interesting that you bring up TikTok because I've actually been involved in a little bit of research that looks at the potential impact of TikTok in different sorts of ways as it goes for people thinking about ADHD, thinking about their own behavior, their own patterns of thought and so forth, and how they may or may not fit.

So one of the things that I've been involved in is some research that's really being led by folks at the University of British Columbia where in a two-part study, they looked first at the accuracy of information that was portrayed in the top 100 TikTok ADHD videos. These are brief, usually 20 to 40-second videos that have the #ADHD. By the way, there are an enormous number of people around the world who have seen these types of videos. It's really in the billions, in terms of the hits for #ADHD TikTok videos. But myself and Amori Mikami, who's my collaborator at the University of British Columbia, we rated the top 100 videos. These are videos that are getting anywhere from 50,000 hits to 2 million hits or something like that. And what we found in looking at those most popular videos was that there was a lot of inaccurate information, a lot.

So Amori and I were rating the same videos and we had very good agreement on our ratings. And we were using, at the heart of it, a scale that was from one to five that essentially went from one being this is so inaccurate that it is harmful, that just it being out there is harmful in terms of the information that it's giving about ADHD or purporting to be about ADHD, and then five being this is a good educational video that I would recommend for someone to look at if they wanted to know more about ADHD. And in that set of top 100 videos we, between the two of us, didn't rate a single one as 5. And the majority of videos, it was something like 51%, if I remember correctly, were ones that we were rating down at the bottom end of the scale. So just that part of the study really shows that there's a lot of information out there on this one particular social media outlet that is extremely popular that actually does not give accurate information about ADHD characteristics. So that's a real strike against watching TikTok for accurate ADHD information.

And one of my doctoral students, Maggie Johnson, in contemplating what her dissertation was going to be and her own clinical experience, where in doing assessment at our psychology clinic, it just had been anecdotally observed that a lot of people come in and they say, "I saw this on the internet about ADHD, so I thought well, maybe I have ADHD. So maybe I should get an assessment." And combining that with the fact that we have really long wait lists, there are a lot of people who are coming in and her thought was, "Well, maybe all of this information, including misinformation that's out there on channels or outlets like TikTok is contributing to people thinking, 'Okay. Yeah. I have ADHD too. These things bother me. Maybe I ought to get an assessment. Maybe I need help for this.'"

So her idea was to then create a study in which we recruited college students who actually say, "I don't have ADHD, right? I've never been evaluated for ADHD and I don't have a diagnosis for ADHD." But then bring them into our lab and then randomly assign them to either watch videos from TikTok that have nothing to do with ADHD or a series of relatively short videos about ADHD that all had previously in other research been rated as inaccurate, as having misinformation in them. And her question really is, does a minimal exposure to these ADHD TikTok videos actually shift people's perception of their own potential for having ADHD? In other words, does it change their opinion about whether they meet the criteria for ADHD and whether they think that they ought to get help for it, whether they think they ought to go get an assessment for it?

So I think it's out there obviously and one of the things that I don't want to diminish is that TikTok allows people to tell their story. So in people who have ADHD who have this kind of difference, who want to share their story on TikTok, they do and they can and they may do so in a way that's genuine to their own experience, but unfortunately, it oftentimes comes across as this is the way ADHD is for everybody, when it maybe even for that person isn't about ADHD. It's about other things and they happen to have ADHD too.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Yeah. The difference in that, is that something that you experience in your lab too, I guess, the self-assessments? Because you mentioned your lab, it's the Appalachian Adult ADHD Lab here in Boone, also known as the triple A lab or the AAA Lab.

Canu:

Yeah. Right. Sure. Sure. Triple A sounds good. Although, the Automotive Association might not like that so much. I don't know.

Fletcher:

So if you have the trait or you think you have the trait, but it could be something else, is that something that factors into some of the intervention work that you do?

Canu:

Sure. Sure. Yeah. One of the poorly kept secrets about ADHD is that a lot of the symptoms, things like inattention, things like impulsivity, these are symptoms that also can be present for people who have other kinds of disorders. So if you think about the experience of chronic anxiety, that's a good example of another sort of issue where you're going to be distracted a lot. You're going to be distracted by your own internal thoughts about what's going on or what are people thinking or is that a spider over there in the corner or whatever your particular brand of anxiety is.

If you think about depression, that's another kind of disorder that's marked by things like inattention because you're wrapped up in your thoughts that are depressing, that just actually are like a black hole for your attention. Your attention goes there and stays there and makes it hard to tune into people and things that are around you. So one of the things that's really important in the assessment of ADHD clinically, but also in research is that you try and take that into account. So you need to have measures of things like anxiety and depression and then think, okay, all right, how do I then use this either statistically or individually in the case of a clinical assessment to either suggest yes, this really may be ADHD, or hmm, these are ADHD symptoms that actually probably are more due to something else or it's both sorts of things happening at the same time, which is totally possible?

Fletcher:

We're going to take a break right now, but when we come back, we're going to talk about Dr. Canu's intervention that is aimed to help college students with ADHD to succeed.

Blanks:

We got the chance to talk with Maggie Witherspoon Johnson, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in App State's Clinical Psychology PsyD program. Maggie shares her journey of academic and professional growth under the mentorship of Dr. Canu. She's actually known Will for quite a few years, even had him for some undergraduate classes. She highlighted the unique structure of App State PsyD program, which prioritizes clinical application over research-heavy PhD tracks. Maggie shared how the program prepared her to assess and treat patients, particularly those from underserved populations such as those in rural communities.

Maggie Witherspoon Johnson:

Going into the doctoral program, it's a PsyD program, not a PhD. Typically, PsyD programs are more practice-based than more clinical, whereas PhD tends to be more research-heavy. PsyD is a psychology doctorate versus PhD, which is philosophy. Dr. Canu has a PhD in clinical psychology and he is still a clinical psychologist, which is what my title will be once I'm finished and licensed. I'll just have a different set of letters behind my name. It's just a different structure for the program, more focused on clinical application, rather than research, but we still do have a good bit of research in the program.

Yeah. So I was really surprised specifically with Dr. Canu going into it. I didn't have a lot of research experience, so the connections that he had, the network that he has established with universities across the United States, it just kind of laid out for me as a first-year student in the program. So I was able to do my thesis working with University of Wyoming, University of South Carolina. University of Virginia I think was a part of it as well. And collaborating with other doctorate level psychologists on research of the same group treatment for college students with ADHD. So I had data from all over and I was able to make connections with those people as well, so that was really, really nice.

The professors in our program are all exceptional professors and they're great psychologists. They have a lot of really good experience collectively, so having them serve as our supervisors, we get supervision from all of the clinical professors in the program at App. So we get a variety of experiences and different perspectives on how to conceptualize, how a client is coming in, what kind of difficulties they have, and a lot of different treatment perspectives as well, so we get to try out a lot of different things under their supervision. I particularly felt really well-trained going into my internship year. My internship's very assessment-heavy, so I do a lot of basically a diagnostic setting for ADHD and autism, other developmental disorders. So the assessment training I had overall at App was amazing.

My favorite thing that I've learned through research at App has been an appreciation for how research can serve an underserved community. As a doctorate-level psychologist in training, I'm not a psychologist yet, but as a psychologist in training, our program is angled towards training psychologists to work in rural areas. And we consult literature all the time, research to base our treatments off of because we want to provide evidence-based treatment and for some of these populations that are underserved, the research isn't there. So to have the knowledge base of how to design a study, figure out the need that a community has, design a study and then conduct that research, interpret the data for how best to apply it in a setting like where I'm at is I think really helpful because a lot of the times, we're told that we might be the only doctorate-level psychologists for several, several miles, so we have to be able to know how to access the research and also create it a little bit as well.

I think from my experience, the best way to start off if you're interested in pursuing research, particularly in this area with App, is to learn to be a good consumer of research first because you have to be able to read it and interpret it to know what's lacking and know what you can add to the research base. It can be a bit of a learning curve, learning how to figure out strengths and weaknesses of studies and some more abstract thinking to figure out what future directions that research could go in, but learning to be a consumer of research first is a really good step for me at least, I think.

Blanks:

Many thanks to Maggie Witherspoon Johnson for chatting with Appalachian Excellence. To find out more about the PsyD program, go online to psych.appstate.edu and click on the heading Academics.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about this intervention and how it started and what it leads to.

Canu:

Sure. Yeah. I'm happy to do that. The intervention that recently I and some of my colleagues published, it's called actually Thriving in College with ADHD and what it is it's really a skills training intervention. This was the way I would put it. And it's come out of well, maybe 20 years of research really on my part and then also my collaborators' parts as well. Central in this work have been Cynthia Hartung, who's at the University of Wyoming, and Laura Knouse, who's at the University of Richmond, as well as Kate Flory at the University of South Carolina. And collectively in our careers, we've focused a lot on ADHD in college and in adults and that's both clinically and in our research.

And what we've found, and this is not, again, rocket science, this observation at all, is that the focus in terms of developing intervention for ADHD has firstly been on children. And that of course comes out of the history of ADHD and it being conceptualized originally as a childhood limited disorder. And beyond intervention for children, as you might expect, you go upward a little bit in the developmental range, the lifespan, and you get to adolescence and there are a relatively healthy number of interventions there. But then you get beyond and into adulthood and particularly for some reason, college-age individuals, and it's not a vacuum, but there just are very few interventions.

Now, Cynthia, Kate, Laura, and myself, we have done historically a lot of research that looks at adjustment of students with ADHD and different sorts of risks that they may run and features of ADHD in college-aged individuals. And through all of that, we had always been talking about the fact that there just wasn't that much out there in terms of intervention. Now, to be fair, there are other people who have done some really good work in this area. So Arthur Anastopoulos who is at UNC Greensboro actually, Andrea Chronis-Tuscano who's at the University of Maryland, and others have also been working on interventions for students with ADHD.

And I think where ours is a little bit different is that we've tried to create a modular approach where the different sorts of impairment that college students with ADHD have been shown to have can be approached by a therapist in a way that works for any individual college student who has ADHD. In addition, what we've done is we've published a student workbook under the same title that can be used as a kind of self-help guide or it can be used in conjunction with psychotherapy where the therapist is using our manual.

So we've tried to make, in other words, an intervention that's accessible not just to therapists, but also to students more broadly and we've been working over the last five or six years to test that intervention at our campuses. So each one of us at App and South Carolina and Wyoming have been running ADHD skills groups with our graduate students helping out and over these past 4 or 5, 6, 7 years been kind of testing this and tweaking it and developing it. It's now in this sort of final published form that we hope will allow it to be disseminated a little bit more broadly.

Fletcher:

This is great. This self-help book, is this something that is available or will be available once you're done, so people who might not be a part of your study could use it?

Canu:

Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, it's right here. I've got it here. It is published by Routledge. It's something that's available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble's online, as well as the Taylor & Francis/Routledge website. So I mean, both of these things are now out there and available for use really for anyone who's a licensed counselor or a psychologist or a social worker. Anyone who works with college students with ADHD could use this. And yes, I think that it is possible for someone who has ADHD and doesn't necessarily either have access to that kind of adjunctive psychotherapy or who for other reasons doesn't want to engage in it, can pick up our student workbook and kind of do some work themselves to develop their skills and to better understand what's going on for them.

Fletcher:

That's great. So can you break it down a little bit about what an intervention might look like or one of the things in your book that someone could try out? I'm thinking of some adult friends I have who it's hard for them to concentrate. I don't know if they have an actual diagnosis, but just taking that symptom.

Canu:

Right. Right. Okay. One of the things that we have in the book that's featured... Well, there are two things that I'll mention. First, given that it is a book for college students, one of the things that you'd expect and that we have in there are some techniques that work well for college students with ADHD to focus and concentrate when they need to, when they're studying for a task, when they're writing a paper, that kind of thing. There's also another section that a little bit more broadly focuses on the key skills of organization, time management and planning. And some of the things that you find in both of these sections are things... Actually, I wouldn't say some of the things. Almost all of the things that you find in these sections I think can be helpful for just about any college student, but they're kind of life preservers for people who have ADHD. As an example, let me ask you, Karen, in your daily life, in your work life, how is it that you know what to do and when?

Fletcher:

I make a mental schedule.

Canu:

A mental schedule?

Fletcher:

Mm-hmm.

Canu:

Okay. Do you ever use either paper or electronic-based schedule?

Fletcher:

Yes. For my work day, definitely Google Calendar.

Canu:

Okay. All right. Great. That's a great example, right, of one that is commonly used and really important, so that when the chancellor wants to meet with you and learn about the success of this podcast, then you know, "Oh, okay, 3:00 PM, I need to be over at that office." So you set yourself a reminder and you've got that in your calendar and you know, "Okay. Can't forget this," right?

Fletcher:

Mm-hmm.

Canu:

Well, one of the things that people have to do and everyone knows this who's been through it, when you transition from high school to college, is that you really kind of got to be more on point when it comes to keeping track of all of the things that you need to do and when they are and show up on time and make sure that you're thinking ahead. And again, for all students, that's a transition.

Fletcher:

That's a lot.

Canu:

It's a lot. It's a lot. Of course, there are students who don't really know that that's a strategy that you can use to deal with the exponentially larger number of things in your own domain of responsibility that you have as a college student, compared to high school, right?

Fletcher:

Right.

Canu:

So the students who don't have ADHD who maybe try and take a stab at college life without that kind of thing, maybe for at least a while maybe are able to juggle the things. Maybe they're able to mentally keep track of things. Maybe they've got a system of sticky notes or things shoved in their backpack that kind of help them to remember what they need to do when. Maybe they do look at their syllabi occasionally to make sure that they don't get totally surprised. Right?

But for a student with ADHD, it's probably less likely that they're doing that and that they may in fact be able to do that, so again, a real college life preserver for a student with ADHD who maybe was able to do okay, in fact, well, even in high school because the teachers would give you reminders and a lot of times, you'd be able to get your homework done at the end of class instead of later. And you had this consistent day-to-day schedule that kind of kept you in line and when you got home, you had parents who would say, "Hey, have you done your homework? Hey, are you still working on that homework," or whatever helpful structure they were putting into place. When you go to college, that all kind of disappears. Right? So helping students with ADHD to establish good systems that are calendars and task lists and to put those into place and keep practicing using them and perfecting them, that's one good key example of something that we have in our book that, again, is not rocket science necessarily because it's helpful for everyone.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Canu:

By the time you're a professional, it's almost necessary. I mean, it depends on what you're doing of course, but really, you need that to organize yourself to do well. Well, again, most college students need that, particularly at some point in their careers, and we try to help the students with ADHD realize that earlier than later hopefully and then implement it and see its use and keep using it over a period of time, so it becomes something that is ingrained instead of something that's just sort of a flash in the pan.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Absolutely. And then have success earlier, which is, I mean, our goal.

Canu:

Right. Right.

Fletcher:

Well, that's amazing. Yeah. Just to think of how much I actually use my calendar and my phone where I'm like, "Where am I supposed to be? Put this in as a doctor's appointment." Okay. My next doctor's appointment is in a year, but it's in my calendar.

Canu:

How can you remember those things?

Fletcher:

Yeah.

Canu:

I mean, like you're saying, you make a doctor's appointment a year in advance. How can you possibly remember that without it being on a calendar? That's the point. And the trouble for people with ADHD is that they may in fact be starting at a disadvantage with remembering those kinds of things and then paying attention to them and organizing themselves when they do remember them.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Absolutely. I would imagine, when there's awareness that this is an impediment, that it makes it easier to tackle too, instead of just being like, "I don't know why I can't do this."

Canu:

Sure. Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. It's one of the things that people will anecdotally at least often say when they have just gotten a diagnosis of ADHD, that it helps them to understand why things have been so hard for them, why maybe they're good at some things and not so good at other things, why things have gone the way they have for them in school or relationships or other kinds of things. And one of the components that we put into the Thriving in College with ADHD skills training is actually a healthy dose of psychoeducation. In other words, informing the folks who have a diagnosis of ADHD, what that means, what is the nature of this, thing, and how is it likely to impact you, and what are the sorts of things that you can do from either a medication standpoint or other sorts of techniques standpoint that have been shown to be able to help.

Because again, one of the things that's characteristic about the disorder is that people most often are diagnosed with this in childhood. So if you're a 6, a 7, an 8, a 9, a 10-year-old, how much is the diagnosing professional going to sit with you and explain to you in a way that you're going to understand and remember what ADHD is? The answer unfortunately, most of the time, at least that's what our anecdotal experience is, it's not often that that happens. Of course, parents are the folks who get that information and it's a question mark as to how much of the information the parents get. And then another sticking point is how much the parents then communicate to the child. And I'm not trying to point fingers at people or blame anybody in this process, but our observation has been that a lot of college students with ADHD know surprisingly little about ADHD.

Fletcher:

Yeah. I can see that because just even as I was preparing for this podcast, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I know what ADHD is." And then I was reading through it and I was like, "Oh, there's so much I don't know." And that's just a cursory overview, but to live with it and not... Also, I would imagine understanding the words that are being told you, especially at eight or nine years old, there's different words that make an impact to the parents versus the child and the medical provider. I imagine there could be a gap in understanding there.

Canu:

Yeah. And there's different things that an 8 or 9-year-old might need to know, than a 16 or 17-year-old, than a 20-year-old. And I don't know how widespread this phenomenon is across all of the psychological and medical conditions that we deal with as human beings, but I think that at least with ADHD, the conversations, the frequency of conversations, the amount, and the specificity, and the accuracy of information that people with this problem are given over the course of their lives I think is fairly sparse. And that also, I think, puts people behind the eight ball because they may not know what some of the likely weak points are going to be. They may not know how they can possibly compensate and what sorts of things they may want to think about doing in a different way in order to be successful in the things that they're doing.

Fletcher:

Right. Right. Yeah. You talked about your lab and you said you bring in students who believe they do not have ADHD and people who believe they do have ADHD.

Canu:

Right. That's in this TikToks. Right.

Fletcher:

In the TikToks. Okay. Well, with your lab here, are you looking for any participation? Would you like to give any kind of shout-out on...

Canu:

Well, I mean, one of the things we have that goes on all the time is that I'm part of this research network that's called U-LEARN, and that stands for Undergraduate Learning, Emotion, and Attention Research Network. This is a group of researchers at 10 universities across the United States from Hawaii up to Syracuse, where we all every year work to develop sort of what I'd call a meta-study that asks college students about their experiences, their behaviors, their thoughts that relate to ADHD and that relate to potential research questions that we have in all of our different teams.

And we do this through our departments of psychology. We have a system that's called Sona that recruits people in psychology classes to take part. It's called the College Student Survey, which is very generic, but that's something that we sort of have open recruitment for, for people who are participating in psychology courses that have participation in Sona studies as a component of that. So they're usually introductory to mid-level psychology courses and that's kind of the thing that we're most broadly recruiting for right now.

We are running a college skills group. That's something that we do run every term and we typically have recruitment in the early parts of the semester, so the first three weeks, one month, or something like that. Those are the things that are going on that are sort of actively recruiting. There's also the study that I talked about earlier, the one that Maggie is doing for her dissertation. Even though Maggie is actually off on her pre-doctoral internship in Louisiana right now, we are continuing to collect data for that, so that's another thing that's kind of run recruitment-wise through our Sona System.

Fletcher:

Great. Thanks.

Canu:

Yeah.

Fletcher:

Is there anything we haven't asked you about that you would like to share?

Canu:

Oh, gosh. Well, I mean, one of the questions that you had posed that might be interesting to talk about a little bit is, I don't know, our PsyD program.

Fletcher:

Yes.

Canu:

Okay. Okay. All right. One of the most fulfilling and exciting things that I do here at App State is I teach in our doctorate of psychology program. That is a PsyD in clinical psychology program.

Blanks:

Tell me what PsyD is again.

Canu:

Yeah. Actually, it is that. It's a doctor of psychology. Our PsyD program, this is a relatively new offering in the Department of Psychology. I guess it was about six years ago we started this doctoral training program and this is something that replaced a master's level clinical psychology program that we had had for a long time I think in the 40, 50-year range. And after a lot of planning, a lot of bargaining, a lot of work with our administration and with the state level administration, we're able to implement this doctoral training program. And it's exciting. I've really gotten a lot out of working with our students. It's not to say that I didn't get a lot out of working with our former master's students or don't continue to get a lot out of working with our undergrads, but this is really neat because we get a chance to kind of have a program that moves people all the way through their training to where they are, in air quotes, "full-fledged clinical psychologists," who are ready to serve their communities.

And our particular focus is one that is special and is relevant for our university because we focus on training people to have all of the knowledge and skills they need to practice in rural communities. That's really our focus and that's been really fulfilling in multiple kinds of ways. As you might imagine, it's nice to just have a more in-depth and lengthy training experience with our students to see the growth from just entering the program as a first year to then going off and doing their training really all over the country. Our students now who were in their fifth or sixth year are now off at sites all across the United States, getting their final clinical capstone experience, which is called a pre-doctoral internship. So it's been really fulfilling to see that through to its fruition and we also recently received accreditation from the American Psychological Association, which is a major step for our program, and it sort of requires being at this point. So I mean, that's been really exciting. I really enjoy that a lot.

Fletcher:

That sounds really exciting and I know there's been quite a bit of interest in that program as well.

Canu:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that part of that out of the gate was honestly just having a reputation for having a good master's program. And pretty much every year, since the first year that we recruited for the doctoral program, we've seen incrementally more interest in terms of completed applications. And we've been fortunate to have really great students and I have no doubt that that's going to continue. Yeah.

Fletcher:

Yeah. And we're at the perfect location for the rural experience, so I think that's great. It's much needed. There's a lot of rural communities in the United States.

Canu:

And a lot of shortcomings in terms of the coverage for psychological services in those communities and in North Carolina too. We have a lot of rural counties in North Carolina and some of them don't have a single psychologist. There's a lot of need out there.

Fletcher:

Yeah. There is.

Canu:

And one of the things that we really hope is, in having the particular mission that we have, that we can make some difference locally, but potentially also regionally and nationally as people go on through their careers and they take the skills and the knowledge that they have and go elsewhere.

Fletcher:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Canu:

Yeah.

Fletcher:

Dr. Will Canu, thank you so much for being here and for your inspiring work. I've really enjoyed getting to know a little bit more about it.

Canu:

Well, thanks, Karen.

Fletcher:

If you liked what you heard and are interested in learning more about the work being done at App State, subscribe on your favorite platform, so you never miss an episode. This is Karen and Dave saying thank you for listening to Appalachian Excellence, featuring Appalachian research, scholarship, and creative activity, creating solutions, inspiring change.

Blanks:

Bye, Karen.

Fletcher:

Bye, Dave.

Canu:

But if you take it and give it to a system that's already working all right-

Blanks:

It's like the old-school TVs where you'd smack it on the side and then it would get better. It'd be like, "Oh, the picture's perfect." If you smack it on the side, it's not going to do anything helpful.

Canu:

Well, yeah, that's a great analogy. I'm going to use that analogy from now on. That's a great analogy. I mean-

Blanks:

But kids won't-

Canu:

No. The kids won't get it, but people our age might. I mean-

Blanks:

Punch the TV.

Canu:

Yeah.

Blanks:

Really?

Canu:

Yeah. You know when The Fonz hits the juke... Oh, wow.

Blanks:

Right. Yeah. Exactly.

Canu:

I mean, the guy from Arrested Development.

Blanks:

Yeah. Winkler.

Canu:

He doesn't hit a jukebox. He's a lawyer. Wait, what's a jukebox?

Blanks:

Now, we really sound old. Kids today don't know The Fonz. It's all digital jukebox. In my day, he had dimes. Put another dime in the jukebox, baby. That's what she said.

Canu:

We could at least make a promo just with that and be like, "Oh, my God, I have to listen to that train wreck of a podcast."

Blanks:

Karen, rock and roll. Come on!

Canu:

Oh, jeez.

Fletcher:

Oh, man.