Lydia McCarthy (she/they) is a licensed therapist, an artist and an educator. She has over ten years of experience teaching and supporting college students as they develop their artistic voice and explore their identities, which has shaped her clinical interests. She has experience working with adults in creative fields and higher education, navigating gender and sexual identities, experiencing anxiety and depression, and processing life and career transitions.

Lydia uses an integrated, person-centered psychodynamic approach grounded in compassion. This includes concepts from Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatics, mindfulness and analysis. She identifies as queer and uses a queer approach in her work with clients, with the belief that each individual is the expert of their own experience. She does this by seeking to understand how clients construct meaning of their world, by recognizing the strengths they already have and by supporting them in developing new insight. In this process, Lydia seeks to highlight and validate how the social environment and systems have impacted a client’s relationship with themselves and others, and to use the therapeutic relationship to break down hierarchies and offer new outcomes.

Lydia received an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MSW from the State University of New York at Brockport. In 2024 she was awarded a Distinguished Professors Scholarship and a Departmental Distinguished Scholar Award from SUNY Brockport as well a scholarship from The New York State Society of Clinical Social Work. Prior to returning to school for her MSW, she was an Associate Professor of Photography at Alfred University. Lydia has training from the University of Rochester Counseling Center, the Greene Clinic and the Insight Meditation Society.