Above and beyond: Jolie Fritz honored for hard work, dedication

07/27/20 02:49:pm

jolie fritz.jpg Jolie Fritz, LPC, SAC-IT, works as the lead therapist for the Nashotah Center for DBT Female adolescent residential care.

She first came to Rogers around five years ago, starting as a residential counselor in the Focus Depression Recovery Charles E. Kubly adult residential center. After finishing graduate school with her master’s in community psychology, Jolie joined the Nashotah team as their first intensively trained and supervised dialectical behavior therapy therapist.

“Her clinical judgement for complex residents is remarkable and she obtains outstanding clinical outcomes for her residents,” says Erik Ulland, MD, medical director, Nashotah Center. “She is exceptionally skillful with families and residents. Families in our program love her.”

Dr. Ulland mentions a time early in Jolie’s time with the program where she offered to treat 10 families for weeks until another therapist could be hired. During this time, she inherited four families midway through their treatment, was the sole therapist on the unit for weeks, kept her 90-minute family sessions, met with parents, ran groups, and participated in Parent University.

“She is always willing to help and spends extra time leading, teaching, and supervising our clinicians, including residential care specialists,” Dr. Ulland says. “Her constant willingness to go the extra mile is pretty much unrivaled.”

Jolie says that she is grateful for the recognition and wants to emphasize that everyone on the Nashotah team, from the Medical Director to the skills trainers and RCS staff deserve recognition for going above and beyond to support our residents and their families. Jolie is grateful that Rogers has allowed the team to continue to work in-person during COVID.

“It’s an honor to be part of a unit where there is a high investment in patient care,” she says. “Many of the girls we work with suffer from abandonment issues, so having the ability to continue working with them in person when they aren’t able to see their family is vital. It’s important to us that we’re there to help patients through the extra complexities of quarantine and social distancing.”

After being a stay-at-home mom for 10 years, Jolie decided to return to school for her master’s degree. To get more experience in mental healthcare, she sought a job at Rogers, and after graduating, she transitioned to work at the Nashotah Center.

“It was really important to me to continue my passion for DBT and hone my DBT skills,” she says. “I had completed intense training in DBT and it was important to me to work in a unit that practiced high fidelity DBT – and Nashotah was the best place to continue to explore that.”

Jolie’s passion for DBT started when she interned at the Center for Behavioral Medicine, which was the first Marsha Linehan DBT certified programs in the country.

“Once I discovered that the Nashotah program followed a high-fidelity model, it intrigued me and I wanted to see what DBT could look like at a higher level of care,” Jolie says.

“We work with patients presenting with very complex issues, difficult family systems and trauma. It’s incredible to see the amount of change and the difference we can make in a relatively short time.”