Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Clinical psychologist Dr. Lila McQueen is returning her practice to Sweet Home beginning on Jan. 7, moving back to the same office in the Solar Way Building and telephone number she had before she moved her office to Lebanon in 1995.
McQueen opened her practice in Sweet Home in 1984 and then moved to Lebanon to better serve a wider area of east Linn County.
She practices with her husband, Dean McQueen, a counselor at Sweet Home Junior High for many years. He provides testing and neurofeedback services. He retired from School District 55 in 1995.
“It’s time for us to return to our home town,” McQueen said. “This is a plan Dean and I have had for years, to eventually come back to Sweet Home to provide counseling and testing in our own community and be closer to the family ranch.”
The McQueens live at the end of McQueen Drive in Holley on a timber and cattle ranch that has been in the family since the mid-1800s.
“McQueens have served the east Linn County area in the fields of health care and education for generations,” McQueen said. Like their children, two sons and one daughter, McQueen’s husband grew up in Sweet Home and graduated from Sweet Home High School.
McQueen received her doctorate degree in psychology in 1967 from the University of Oregon Psychology Department. Dean McQueen has a master’s degree in counseling and school psychology from the University of Oregon. The two met while undergraduates at Linfield College.
After graduating from the University of Oregon, McQueen went into testing and research, she said. “When we moved back to Sweet Home full time, I wanted to be able to bring psychological services right to the people here, the people I knew, the people I saw every day.”
At that time, the only service was provided by an Albany couple, she said. She didn’t start straight into clinical psychology though.
“I started in college as a journalism major,” she said. “As a junior, I took my first psychology class, and it was all over from there.”
But she did spend time working for The New Era, she said. She wrote for The New Era from 1979 to 1981.
“Journalism is the most wonderful way to get to know the people of town and how the organizations work,” she said. That’s one of the things that convinced her Sweet Home could use her services as a clinical psychologist, and the same thing she found enticing about journalism was the same thing she found interesting about psychology: getting to know a wide variety of people.
She opened her practice in 1984.
The McQueens offer psychotherapy and testing for adults, children and adolescents, couples and families. Services include treatment of emotional, cognitive and behavior problems as well as assessments of learning abilities, personality, educational achievement and vocational interests. They specialize in the treatment of attention deficit disorder and other learning problems as well as marriage problems, depression, anxiety and substance abuse.
As a psychologist in Oregon, McQueen cannot prescribe medication, she said. Psychiatrists are medical doctors and permitted to prescribe medicine, although that distinction is disappearing in other states.
“We used to run a series of ads,” McQueen said. “The headline on the ad was ‘Let’s talk.'”
In the ad, she talked about various issues people were concerned about, she said. A big part of her work is talking, usually with her doing the listening.
“In our practice, we use cognitive behavior therapy, mainly,” she said. She provides reading materials to patients, and she and they talk about ways of altering the habits of thought and behavior that are at the root of difficulties.
Cognitive behavior therapy is at least as effective as prescription drugs, and by using both the therapy and drugs, the odds of successfully treating a disorder reach 90 percent, McQueen said. “When medications are really needed, they are very valuable.”
But most problems can be treated through cognitive behavior therapy, she said. “Teaching is part of it – educating about one’s self, how the brain works and the central nervous system.”
Clients learn techniques for use outside of sessions, she said, giving them a new understanding of their existing problems and how to change them.
Computerized neurofeedback techniques also help create new habits in thinking, she said. Her husband runs that portion of the clinic. Electrodes monitor client brainwaves, and by changing their thought patterns patients can manipulate patterns on the computer monitor, completely without using their hands. The information gleaned from those sessions is used to guide treatment, while it also helps clients develop new thinking habits, helping clients control memory, anxiety and pain.
After a certain number of sessions, the thinking becomes habitual, she said. “Like any intervention in health care, it doesn’t work for everybody, but it works for most people.”
The McQueens employ two Sweet Home women in their clinic, Kelly Nave and Debbie Galster.
All four are looking forward to the clinic’s return to Sweet Home, McQueen said. “I’m just looking forward to seeing old friends again and making new friends, people who have been patients and others who haven’t.”
Lila McQueen is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Oregon Psychological Association and the World Federation for Mental Health. She is licensed by the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners and is on a number of insurance panels.
Patient days will be limited initially to Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Appointments may be made by calling 367-8220.