Brief History
Dr. Tony Madril, DSW, LCSW (he/him) is the founder of the Resilience Institute for Trauma Recovery and a licensed clinical social worker. He completed his Master of Social Work degree at the University of Denver in 1997 and earned his Doctor of Clinical Social Work in 2021 from the University of Pennsylvania. He has 27 years of post-graduate mental health experience as well as several years of specialized training in trauma therapies such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Ego States Therapy, the Flash Technique, and Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT). In addition, he has received training in mindfulness and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center and UC San Diego’s Center for Mindfulness.
Dr. Madril is an adjunct clinical professor of trauma studies at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Social Work and is a member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and the EMDR International Association. He specializes in treating adults with symptoms of complex trauma and anxiety in his private practice office in Los Angeles and delivers services to residents of Colorado via telehealth.
In addition, Dr. Madril’s experience includes supervising associate clinical social workers and providing skill-based trainings to organizations about the intersection between mindfulness and the prevention of vicarious trauma and empathic fatigue in today’s challenging workspaces complicated by COVID-19.
Recent History
Tony has dedicated the last several years delivering direct services to clients and teaching other human services professionals in a variety of settings. While at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Division of Child Psychiatry, from 2002 -2007, Tony delivered outpatient psychotherapy to children and adolescents who were functionally impaired by severe and persistent mental illness and come from multi-racial/multi-ethnic backgrounds, economically disadvantaged households, including youth who were wards or dependents of the juvenile court in need of mental health services. Many of his clients were handicapped students identified by local educational institutions as special education pupils. In addition to providing direct counseling services, Tony engaged allied child welfare agencies, educational and social institutions in creating supportive infrastructures designed to meet the individual mental health and educational needs of his clients.
In 2007, Tony left Harbor-UCLA to accept a clinical supervisor position at Augustus Hawkins Mental Health Center in the Watts-Willowbrook area of Los Angeles. There he provided clinical supervision and psychiatric consultation to other mental health providers, medical caseworkers, and trainees in social work and psychology. He also designed and implemented a clinic-based Dialectical Therapy Program (DBT) for high-risk youth.
From 2009 – 2013, Tony taught child welfare workers at the Los Angeles County Department of Children & Family Services (DCFS) how to identify and address the underlying mental health needs of children and their families, and provided individual and group coaching services to social work managers to improve the delivery of child welfare service by frontline workers. Here, Tony also designed a curriculum to train child welfare workers to use mindfulness to reduce work-related stress and prevent the onset of vicarious trauma.
During the same time, Tony concurrently developed specialized skills in mindfulness approaches to treating anxiety and other emotional disorders at the training program for mental health professionals at the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center (MARC) at UCLA, and through continuing education conferences. He has led several mindfulness workshops himself, teaching others the means of better managing anxiety and other stress-related symptoms. In addition, Tony has dedicated many hours to integrating the skills of mindfulness into his own life by attending various mindfulness-based residential retreats and stress-reduction programs.
Today, Tony teaches mindfulness-based strategies for reducing stress to human service professionals as an instructor for the UC Davis, Center for Human Services, and maintains a private practice office in Los Angeles where he specializes in using Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (MBCT) to treat anxiety and depression in adolescents and adults. His clinical subspecialty is helping LGBT youth, and their families, successfully move through the parallel process of “coming-out.”