Guided by Joy
Dr. Adam Joy’s past, present, and future in mental health services
—By Lexi Flores
The doctor as the patient
Adam Joy didn’t realize right away that he was anxious. He followed his parents’ lead: always proceeding with caution and questioning everything along the way. When they divorced, the split left him unsettled. Only in fourth grade, he refused offers of therapy. “I just wanted to be okay,” he recalls, “even though I didn’t necessarily feel okay.”
Dr. Adam Joy, PsyD, LP, didn’t start seeing a therapist until years after he was one himself—and even that experience was somewhat forced. After dealing with his first heartbreak just after college, he avoided seeking mental health services again, still trying to pass off as “okay all the time.” Instead, he turned to substances as a coping strategy. Acknowledging his struggles, Joy joined Michigan’s Health Professional Recovery Program when he was in his mid-thirties. Here, health professionals can still practice as long as they follow the guidelines and sanctions set by the program. His therapist during this journey, Kathy Dillon, gave him the space necessary to explore his past life and let go of the anxiety built from his childhood; sobriety came along the way. Since then, Joy has remained as a patient in mental health services, as well as a doctor in them.
Why psychology?
Growing up, his mother always considered him to be of the analytical sort. He has an almost “intuitive sense” to see someone and understand how they work. While that played a role in his career choice, it was his experiences with his nephew that solidified his decision to work in psychology. After a terrible mistake from a doctor, Joy’s nephew went from healthy to severely disabled. Unable to walk and communicate on his own, his family tried everything to understand him. “There’d be times he would smile and that’s lovely. But there’d be times where he would cry, too. And we wouldn’t know why.”
Joy, only 16 at the time, recognized his ability to use his analytical approach to decipher his nephew’s wants and needs without typical communication. He describes his main takeaway as follows: “If someone has the ability either through their behavior or through their words to communicate something they need instead of staying helpless in their struggle, I wanted to connect that to my ability to read people…. Psychology felt like a really good fit for that.”
From there, Joy began his career journey as a psychology major at Michigan State University and went on to complete his Master’s and Doctoral degrees at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology. Now, when speaking to a patient, he considers not only what they tell him, but what they don’t tell him. This belief that every gesture, silence, or word is meaningful became the foundation of his therapeutic approach.
Joy Family Center
After spending time in California, New York, and Minnesota to complete his doctoral degree and postdoc, Joy dreamed of bringing his work back home. In 2016, Joy founded the Joy Family Center, first in East Lansing and later in Ann Arbor. At the forefront of his services was evidence-based treatment that made his patients feel like family.
In 2020, Joy noticed that the pandemic had accelerated the demand for mental health services, Joy’s caseload filling quickly. Rather than turn his practice into a patient maximizing organization—a “bill mill,” as Joy calls it—he wanted to build a team that has the same standards of care that he holds. “I’m really lucky,” he says. “We have a pretty diverse staff, and everyone is really passionate about care and is excited to be doing the job.”
The climate shifts
Through the pandemic, Joy observed the importance of mental health be unveiled to a greater population than ever before. “When people are stuck at home and isolated,” he remembers, “we start to fall apart in ways we didn’t anticipate.” People who maybe would never have reached out for help, started to. Another positive was the increased popularity of telehealth that came with the pandemic, an addition Joy was happy to make to his practice.
However, recently, it feels like this “great wave of progress” has faced retraction. Misconceptions still linger, he notes. Many assume that therapy means digging up buried traumas or enduring harsh interpretations. In reality, Joy’s approach centers on the conversation: connecting with who patients are as people, what their values are. “We’re not as scary as people think,” he laughs. “We’re not too bad.”
Most pressingly, the policies being pushed by the current administration are expected to diminish access to mental healthcare during a time of increased need for it. According to Nathaniel Counts, Chief Policy Officer at The Commonwealth Fund, “cuts to behavioral health grants threaten access to lifesaving care.” Moreover, a study conducted by Caroline Kelly, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, actually provides evidence that there is an increased need for greater investment in mental health programs.
From what Joy has observed, it seems like people are less likely to utilize mental health resources, which in turn makes people less likely to talk about it, too. His concerns lie in the fact that barriers to mental health access are being built up rather than torn down. “A lot of the programs that are experiencing funding cuts are those in rural areas, which are underserved already.” Joy explains, “it just discourages a group from being able to utilize something that would benefit them.” Rural communities often face unique challenges—long travel distances, fewer providers, and a stronger stigma around seeking help—which makes these cuts feel particularly devastating. As mentioned before, utilizing resources like telehealth can diminish these effects, but the problem is that people aren’t taking advantage of these opportunities as much as they should.
When asked about how to combat the pushback on mental health services, Joy suggests prioritizing local impact. For now, his goal is to keep faith and spread the word: the more people we can get mental health services to, the greater the culture of practicing self-care. In Ann Arbor, Joy has focused on continuing his personal mission of acting as a “safe haven for those that may need [our] services.” At the University of Michigan, Joy hosts events in the Diag and encourages students to open the conversation towards mental health. For example, last year, Joy hosted a Behind the Mask event where students were encouraged to write the traits they project to others on the front of the mask, and the traits they tend to hide from others on the back. The aim was to get students to self-reflect, hopefully recognizing any maladaptive thoughts that might have been elicited by the exercise. At the university level, Joy finds that the variety of mental health resources that are offered has played a big part in reducing the stigma. Even when the going gets tough, Joy and Ann Arbor have worked to be a resisting factor to the counter trend against mental health by staying grounded in their mission to make local resilience overcome national barriers.
The times ahead
Looking forward, Joy remains cautious but hopeful. His biggest worry lies in the growing financial burdens and insurance unaffordability. “Unfortunately, health is one of the things people cut when money gets tight.” He explains, “people are like, I can be stressed, but I need to eat and keep the roof over my head.” If this trend continues, Joy is concerned that this increased need will be supplemented with underutilization of services, creating a vicious cycle of poor mental health.
Nonetheless, Joy believes that these ebbs and flows of attitudes towards mental health will swing back in an open direction soon. In the meantime, he will continue to focus his work on what he can control: offering care that is compassionate, accessible, and rooted in dignity. “I’m always looking for ways to encourage people to have a conversation or just normalize it—why should it be any different than going to the gym or the dentist?”
Feature photo, Joy Family Center; Photo Credit, Lexi Flores