March 21, 2025
Finding Purpose Through Advocacy and Mental Health, Featuring LCSW Andrew Chiodo
How do life’s biggest challenges shape the work we do?
For Andrew Chiodo, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Therapist, the path to helping others started with understanding himself. Growing up gay in a traditional Brooklyn neighborhood, he had to navigate a world that didn’t always accept him. Then, as the AIDS crisis devastated his community, he found himself on the frontlines—advocating, fighting, and supporting friends through unthinkable loss.
But through it all, Andrew discovered something powerful: his struggles weren’t just obstacles—they were shaping his purpose. His journey from activism to social work led him to a career of helping others find clarity, resilience, and healing.
In this episode of No Wrong Choices, we explore how Andrew turned personal adversity into a lifelong mission, what it takes to thrive as a therapist, and the lessons we can all take from his path.
If you’ve ever wondered how to turn life’s challenges into something meaningful, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
Key Highlights:
- Navigating identity while growing up in a traditional Brooklyn family.
- The impact of the AIDS crisis and his role in LGBTQ+ advocacy.
- How activism led him to a career in mental health and social work.
- The mindset therapists use to support others while managing their own emotions.
- Practical advice for anyone considering a career in therapy or social work.
Listen now on your favorite podcast platform!
To discover more episodes or connect with us:
- website: https://www.nowrongchoices.com/
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- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/no-wrong-choices-podcast/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nowrongchoices
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100086704773105
00:00 - Introduction to Andrew Chiodo
02:16 - Growing Up Different in Brooklyn
08:12 - Navigating the AIDS Crisis
16:21 - Finding Purpose in Social Work
27:04 - Building a Private Practice
35:07 - Modern Challenges in Therapy
44:28 - Media Portrayals of Therapy
49:39 - Career Advice and Final Thoughts
WEBVTT
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Some struggles shape us, others define our purpose.
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Those are the themes we explore in this episode of no Wrong Choices, featuring the licensed clinical social worker and therapist, andrew Chiodo.
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Thank you so much for joining us.
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I'm Larry Samuel, soon to be joined by my collaborators Tushar Saxena and Larry Shea.
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Before we kick off, please be sure to support us by liking, following or subscribing to the show, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Now let's get started, andrew.
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Thank you so much for joining us.
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Pleasure, larry.
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It's a delight to be here with you and I'm happy to share the stories and the arc of the career.
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Why don't you set the stage for us and just tell us you know, in your own words, who is Andrew Chiodo and what do you do?
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So, as of today and since 08, 2008, I'm a psychotherapist, licensed clinical social worker in private practice in the Flatiron District, wherein I treat individuals, couples, families and adolescents for a variety of psychiatric disorders, ranging from depression and anxiety to ADHD, bulimia, gambling addictions and some alcohol and drug addictions.
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Um, that's been an outgrowth of many years of being in hospitals and what preceded that, which got me into the work, is a is a whole other story, um, which we can get to, but that's been the primary practice for 17 years privately.
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Got it All right, so let's begin at the beginning.
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You know, were you always a kid who wanted to help people?
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Did you feel that you were built to do do?
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Were you built to be a caretaker, so to speak?
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Well, I grew up in a sliver of Brooklyn called Diker Heights, which was, for better or worse in those days in the late 60s, early 70s, very protected by the mafia and very intense, and so it was very Catholic.
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We went to church every Sunday.
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It was very Catholic, we went to church every Sunday, and in my household the drill was there was Jesus Christ there was the Pope and there was Frank Sinatra, Not necessarily in that order.
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That was it.
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Like you know, you genuflected at.
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Francis, albert and you were good.
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So, but from a very early age I would say six or seven I understood that I was different, and by that I mean I understood that I had an attraction to men, but I couldn't, you know, it's not something you verbalize, it's unconscious.
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And so, as a result of that, you one, I started to sort of pull back because I understood it was dangerous.
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I don't know how I understood it, but I did, and I calibrated my movements, my behavior, to the environment, and so I was very sensitive.
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I was a really sensitive kid, but perceptive, and understood that if I make a wrong move or if I'm to something, I could get my ass kicked.
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And that happened on occasion, as it did to many other kids in the neighborhood.
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And so I understood how to navigate a neighborhood that was very complicated and very kind of intense, because our parents were raised by immigrants and they had one foot in the old world and one foot in the new world.
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They wanted us to assimilate, and so going to Catholic school from grades one through eight was intense and hard, and I understood that.
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When it came time to go to high school, my parents said do you want to go to Catholic school and I said no.
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So they put me in New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst, brooklyn, where I quickly gravitated to the school's literary magazine and became the editor and started to dabble with writing and words.
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And I was a kid who was always had his head in a book or his face in a book, or I'd go to the bleaker street cinema in those days and watch foreign movies.
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And I wanted to meet guys at 15 or 16.
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And I knew it wasn't going to happen in Bay Ridge, brooklyn or Diker Heights, and so I ventured in.
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Beginning sophomore, junior year of high school, I was in the city every weekend, I was at museums and I wound up working in Red Hook in those days, which was very rough, and at a paper company, and met a fellow of mine, a friend, and he was about six years older.
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And soon enough in my late adolescence, like 16, 17, 18, I found myself in the.
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You know it was post stonewall, it was hedonistic, it was fluid, and I found myself at underground gay discos and studio 54.
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And I was doing all sorts of stuff that was I shouldn't have been doing, but I did it and it was an education and it was a lot of fun.
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I want to ask you just real quick I need to interject because that's such a huge part of the layers of the onion that are you basically, how did that affect you, kind of hiding that aspect of your life for your entire childhood and only letting it out in certain areas?
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I mean that must have had a profound effect on you in terms of how you navigated the world.
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I learned how to compartmentalize very quickly and to show parts of myself to some people and not to others, how to read a room very quickly, how to deflect with humor, how to please people so that they would not get too close to me, so that they would know.
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Now that was there.
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When I got to New York and started to really develop a community, I busted out and was, you know, ready, and so I met my first partner in 1983.
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And we were fortunate to have.
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We had a great setup on Perry Street in the village and we had a floor through brownstone and it was a good relationship and we we both were writers and I started writing fiction.
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Um, I wrote for a literary magazine called Christopher Street, which at that time was the literary magazine of the day for gay people, and also for the New York Native, which was a newspaper, and I did restaurant reviews and theater reviews.
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But at the same time that that was happening, there started to become rumors in the community that this strange gay cancer was happening and nobody knew anything.
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And Ronald Reagan had just been ushered into the White House along with the religious right and all of a sudden everything went from a big party to a big hangover and all of a sudden we found ourselves at the sides of our friends at hospital beds, at clinics.
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I was giving eulogies, and this is not an exaggeration.
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I think I was giving eulogies, and this is not an exaggeration.
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I think I was giving eulogies every quarter for somebody.
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So, like you know, four, five, six a year, and so all our friends, virtually all our friends, passed and, wow, we couldn't fathom what was happening.
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So we um mobilized and joined act up, which at that time was run by larry kramer of, who founded the gay men's health crisis.
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And so we did dyans and we did all sorts of stunts with the stock exchange, and we went to washington and we marched and we laid down in streets and I dealt with families who were throwing their kids out of their houses, and these kids didn't have men, didn't have anything anywhere to go, and we watched robust, healthy, 20-something and 30-something men architects, lawyers, doctors, designers robust guys in the prime of their life shrink to what looks like sort of what you see in the sorrow and the pity in concentration camps.
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And so it was a profound.
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The 80s were transformative in that way, and we were doing social work without knowing we were doing social work.
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You know, we just did it.
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We rolled up our sleeves, men and women, and got to work and by 1989, I decided you know I'm doing this and you know my writing wasn't making money and I figured I got it Meaning being an advocate and being a voice for being a voice, being an advocate.
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An advocate, you know, advocating for people in hospitals so that their partners could be at their sides.
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And the doctors were, some were great, some were not um, so we were doing a lot of social work and I decided I should just go do this.
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And so I went and got accepted into hunter college school of social work on 77th street and that was a great fit because it was very community organized.
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Um, it wasn't so clinical as it was grassroots, yeah, in its in terms of the program that you entered into.
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Yeah, the school program in terms and, and the school was very like.
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You couldn't say at hunter that you wanted to do private practice and I didn't want to do it at the time.
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But you couldn't say at Hunter that you wanted to do private practice and I didn't want to do it at the time.
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But you couldn't say that because then you would be like I don't know, looked not so well upon.
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So if you're ostracized, really yeah, not ostracized.
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But if you wanted to do community organizing and you want to do advocacy, it was very sort of strike oriented and very right up my alley, whereas NYU and Fordham were very clinical and great, but clinical, so graduated in 92 and found and then got a job at, luckily a plum job at Mount Sinai.
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Before we explore that, I'm curious.
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You went into the program and, with everything that you had gone through up until that point, what was your vision?
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Like you knew, you wanted to focus and do something, I guess more structured around what you were already doing, but did you have a vision for how you were going to make an impact on the other side of school for how you were going to make an impact on the other side of school.
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It's an interesting question.
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I don't know if at the time I had a strong vision, but I saw myself as advocating for the marginalized and the downtrodden I don't know what the right word is for people who didn't have a voice and felt very strongly and committed to this population.
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And that's where I segued into Sinai, where I worked with severely and persistently mentally ill patients who were underprivileged and very ill, and in that setting.
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I learned because it's a medical model setting in the hospital.
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We attended rounds, there was medication groups, there was a lot of you know.
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We dealt with very sick schizophrenics, bipolar patients, personality disordered patients every day, and so it was trial by fire in the trenches.
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I didn't know I was going to land there.
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When I was in school I had no idea I'd wind up in a psych program.
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But I did and I took to it and I learned a lot and I had a great mentor who was this woman.
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This woman, elaine Hobson was her name and she was all of five foot two and had hair down to her ankles and was bottomlessly compassionate and terrifyingly strong.
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And I wanted that.
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I wanted to inhabit that world, and so it was a great experience from 94 to 2000.
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I want to step back just a little bit and talk to you about and ask you about your career, getting into it, as to how your family reacted to it.
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And then I mean, maybe does that maybe coincide a bit with when did you come out to your parents about, about, about being gay?
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And then when you obviously you are treating those, as you say, who are on the marginalized, on the, on the, on the outs, not the, but the fringes of society, so to speak, at that point how did they accept your career choice?
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Well, they were really good, actually, about the writing as well as the as the social work.
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As the social work, they were high school graduates, middle class people who worked very hard to put their kids through school.
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They were it's a funny story.
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When I came out to my parents, they were confused and befuddled and the only thing they knew how to do was go to a priest and say you know, my son just came out to me and I don't know what to do.
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And I, they must've gotten a gay priest, because the priest said you know, do you love your son?
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And my mother and father said of course we love our son.
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And they said well then, that's all you need to know.
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Yep, that's a great answer.
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How old were?
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How old yeah?
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I was uh 22 okay and you were in school.
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You were in school at this point.
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I was in school at this point I was dating women, but not dating women.
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I had beards, I didn't have beards.
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Um, it was, it was again.
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It was all fluid but they in six months they were great, like they were.
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They were great and I was very fortunate because I watched kids come out in Brooklyn and they got the crap beat out of them by their parents.
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I mean I can imagine growing up in such an insular community hardcore Catholic as you say for them to be very cool about it is great.
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Yeah, I was very lucky and they were very impressed, if I can use that word, with my choice of career and what I was doing, because they were FDR Democrats and they believed in, you know, helping others and being there for people and they were Christian.
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You know they others and uh, being there for people, um, and they were Christian.
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You know, they were really Christian people in the best sense of that word.
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Um, so they were very supportive.
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Um, I have one older brother who was also very supportive, so fortunately, no complaints there and they were very welcoming of my partners and you know, and very just very humane about the whole thing.
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So I was very fortunate and that allowed me, I think, to feel good about what I was doing.
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So you know that's not always the case that a family supports, especially during that era and where you come from the background, etc.
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So that is a good thing.
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So you're at Hunter College for social work, and how long a program is that?
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How long are you going to be there?
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So were you thinking about private practice at that time?
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At that time you said you didn't really say that out loud, but is it in the back of your mind that you want to do private practice, or are you still just all about the community?
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And I'm just going to fall in line here for a minute.
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So it's a two-year program at Hunter College and you have two days of classwork and three days of internship and what I was doing was doing that and then I was supporting myself through from five to 12.
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I'd go to school five to 12.
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I was word processing, if you recall that term.
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I had a brother.
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I vividly remember that.
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I was working with high-end attorneys at law firms and just you know, sort of proofreading, word processing, getting out at midnight, going home or sometimes going to the Odeon for a burger and doing the same thing for two years.
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And so it was in the back of my mind that I wanted to do private practice.
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But I also knew that that was way down the line, because I knew I needed to get real training, because I really didn't know what I was doing.
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I knew how to, I knew how to care for people, I knew how to be empathic, but I didn't have tools in my toolkit yet.
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And it was only at Sinai when I learned how to do what we call psychodynamic therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy excuse me that.
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I started to feel like I could start to really treat people in a real way, and Sinai gave that to me in spades, like they were great.
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And still in 19,.
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In 2000, I was recruited by Cabrini Medical Center to run their psychiatric day treatment program.
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Ironically, it's the hospital where my father was born, so I had a certain affinity for it.
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Um, it was called Christopher Columbus Hospital in the twenties, um, and so I ran that program and during that time.
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That was very interesting because 9-11 happened.
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And you know I can tell you an anecdote that's funny and not funny about 9-11, because I was at that time I was supervising psychiatry residents, social work interns, non-clinical staff and clinical staff, because I was wearing a clinical hat and an administrative hat.
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I was responsible for all the clinicians as well as the audits from regulatory agencies that gave us our accreditation.
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So I sort of learned how to be a half a lawyer and a full-time clinician and I was supervising a social work intern on the morning of 9-11, at about 8.45, before anything had happened, and I didn't know.
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You know, in those days, right, we only got our news from radio or TV, and so I'm talking to the social work intern and reading her notes and we're talking and the policy at Cabrini was if a patient was going to be absent, they had to call me and they had to tell me why.
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Because I had to assess, you know, somebody's suicidal, is somebody not feeling well, blah, blah, blah.
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So a patient calls me and says, andrew, I'm not coming into work today because a plane has hit the World Trade Center.
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Says, andrew, I'm not coming into work today because a plane has hit the World Trade Center and I said OK, I'm going to call you back because I was in the middle of something.
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And I said are you OK?
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And she said yeah, I'm OK.
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I said OK, fine.
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So I turned to the intern and I say, and I relate what I just heard, and I say so you know, this is somebody who's not necessarily medication compliant and sometimes they can lapse into psychosis and sound like a psychotic episode.
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Yeah, the phone rings three minutes later.
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It's my boss and he says get up here right now we got a problem, right, yeah, bingo.
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So now we have to sort of contain 30 psych patients who are we're all traumatized right, all of us are traumatized and manage them, manage us, manage the staff and and figure out what to do, because we're all waiting for people to come in and sort of all hands on deck, nobody's coming in to the ER or anybody, as we know, right, you know.
00:21:31.530 --> 00:21:41.909
So that was kind of a moment at Cabrini that was very intense, a bookend to that which is nicer.
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Is that one of the things we did at Cabrini, wherein we had very many talented patients?
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They did artwork which we had framed and we turned the whole center into a gallery oh nice, it was really great and invited the hospital to come in and purchase and there was beautiful artwork and so people purchased.
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It was great PR for our program and I think the patients donated the monies to a 9-11 fund.
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Obviously, as you said, you wore two hats administrative and clinical.
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Was there ever a point in your career where you said I want to go one way or the other Because I mean these?
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You know, as a social worker, I think and you correct me if I'm wrong these really are only kind of the two paths you can go, and so many go the administrative route.
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What is the biggest difference?
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And then, in your case, what made you want to go one way or the other?
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Well, I liked both ways, because the clinical allowed me to be with people and to train and to be in the human section of it, and the administrative piece satisfied my closet OCD, which you know you have to dot your I's, cross your T's, make sure your chart notes are right, get your performance improvement numbers up, and so I was very I'm wired for that and so I really it was a welcome relief for me to step away from clinical stuff and focus in on charts.
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I know that sounds really dry.
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That's okay, it's you.
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It was really dry.
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That's okay, it's you.
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I'm the exact opposite.
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Detail does not exist in my universe.
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So it was a way I I guess it was a way I coped, but I felt I could master it, like I could get my arms around it.
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You can't always get your arms around people and their pathology, but you could around a chart note and we always got like the top not to toot my own horn, but we always got the top accreditation.
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We always came in with flying colors.
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My staff was always great and they were wonderful.
00:24:01.163 --> 00:24:18.336
So it was a really good to answer the question a really good combination that worked both from a human place and a I don't know paperwork place and kept me sane a little bit.
00:24:18.336 --> 00:24:23.928
But it meant going in on weekends and looking at charts and you know it was a lot of work.
00:24:24.648 --> 00:24:34.732
All right, so what is the biggest difference, then, between an administrative social worker and a clinical social worker, outside of the paperwork portion of it?
00:24:37.221 --> 00:24:44.269
So that's a good question, because in the hospital system, especially at North General, they wanted numbers.
00:24:44.269 --> 00:24:48.516
They wanted us to get patients in.
00:24:48.516 --> 00:24:50.246
They would double book patients.
00:24:50.246 --> 00:24:52.114
I didn't agree with this, but I did it.
00:24:52.114 --> 00:24:54.201
They would double book patients.
00:24:54.201 --> 00:24:59.297
They were all about getting the, getting the funds and the clinic.
00:24:59.297 --> 00:25:04.506
I had to really balance the clinicians because the clinicians were like, why are they double booking us?
00:25:04.506 --> 00:25:10.115
And inevitably when you double book somebody, the truth is only one person shows you right.
00:25:10.115 --> 00:25:17.282
You book one person, you don't get a client, you don't get money and so you don't make income, you don't make revenue that way.
00:25:17.282 --> 00:25:32.152
And so that's the biggest difference was trying to bridge the understanding that we needed to get financing and revenue and provide good clinical care and those things can be at odds with each other.
00:25:34.060 --> 00:25:42.694
And that was hard because sometimes two people would show up and somebody would have to wait.
00:25:42.694 --> 00:25:48.551
The clinician would be stressed Were they doing their best work, knowing they had somebody right outside waiting to come in.
00:25:48.551 --> 00:25:49.394
It was hard.
00:25:49.394 --> 00:26:11.132
That would be the biggest difference and hospitals have to do that and for better or worse and I'm not proud of this, but Cabrini and North General both and St Vincent's all went under no longer hospitals in New York City and they went under because they were not administratively managed well.
00:26:11.339 --> 00:26:22.027
So, Andrew, can you tell us when you made the decision that you were ready to go out on your own, so to speak, and start your own practice?
00:26:22.027 --> 00:26:23.628
And start your own practice.
00:26:23.648 --> 00:26:42.652
Sure, it was that was 08, 18 years after having worked in three hospitals, that I felt confident enough to pull the plug on institutions and plug in the plug on private therapy.
00:26:43.201 --> 00:26:44.065
And how do you do that?
00:26:44.065 --> 00:26:46.006
Do you hang a shingle?
00:26:46.006 --> 00:26:46.969
Do you place an ad?
00:26:46.969 --> 00:26:48.483
How do you get started?
00:26:48.785 --> 00:26:51.633
Well, it helped me that my boss quit.
00:26:51.633 --> 00:27:04.201
My boss at North General quit and I didn't want to work for anybody else, so I thought I'm out and I was already starting a private practice part-time in the evenings.
00:27:04.201 --> 00:27:10.468
And then I used my network from Sinai Cabrini, north General.
00:27:10.468 --> 00:27:30.261
I had a lot of psychiatrist friends, a lot of social worker friends, and I used that word of mouth and my network to build a practice which took me a good seven years.
00:27:30.261 --> 00:27:35.288
Before I was at 45 patients a week and now I'm at about 35, and that's a good number for me.
00:27:35.749 --> 00:27:41.500
So this question kind of goes without saying that everybody, this field isn't for everybody, right?
00:27:41.500 --> 00:27:44.170
It takes a very, I think, special person to be a therapist.
00:27:44.170 --> 00:27:54.307
But I have to ask this question, jokingly but not really jokingly how sick do you get of listening to people's problems all day long?
00:27:54.307 --> 00:27:56.511
Because that's not for everybody, right?
00:27:56.511 --> 00:28:03.828
It takes, like you said, some real empathy and some real care and some real understanding to, day after day, you have your own problems.
00:28:03.828 --> 00:28:06.900
You're dealing with somebody else's, that's that's a lot.
00:28:06.960 --> 00:28:14.971
Yeah, you know, I think in the beginning it's really, really, really hard because you're not, it's an untrained muscle.
00:28:14.971 --> 00:28:43.330
So if you think of it like going to the gym and working a certain muscle that gets stronger and stronger and stronger over the years, I can sit down now, now and um, and it's the rare occasion that I get a really boring patient, although I've had them and uh what qualifies as a boring question.
00:28:44.373 --> 00:28:45.634
Problems are rudimentary.
00:28:45.875 --> 00:28:46.536
Good question.
00:28:48.441 --> 00:29:13.873
People who are I have to do, I have to be delicate here, people who are repetitive and sort of bring in the same problem every week, every week, every week, without really listening, and you have to know when to intervene, really listen, and you have to know when to intervene so I can, someone can come into the office at a first meeting and usually nowadays I can see what the path is for them.
00:29:13.873 --> 00:29:21.665
But I'm not, I'm not going to say that I have to wait and I have to be patient and I have to know when to when are they?
00:29:21.806 --> 00:29:22.769
ready to hear this?
00:29:22.769 --> 00:29:29.208
You know, know, when are they ready to hear that they're acting like their mother, who they complained to me about for the last six months?
00:29:29.208 --> 00:29:43.425
I'd assume that's what, to me that that seems like the essence of the boring patient you know, and so it just requires and I think this is where karate and meditation helped me be very patient.
00:29:43.425 --> 00:29:49.275
It's the work, it's like anything.
00:29:49.275 --> 00:29:52.066
It's like you go to work and you're a lawyer.
00:29:52.125 --> 00:29:59.571
There are things about doing, being a lawyer that are not so interesting, but you have to do them and you learn how to do them.
00:29:59.571 --> 00:30:02.923
And how does one?
00:30:02.923 --> 00:30:05.990
How does a therapist separate his problems right?
00:30:05.990 --> 00:30:14.233
Because I've gone through parental deaths, deaths of friends, my own sort of personal challenges.
00:30:14.233 --> 00:30:33.201
How do I do that while I'm sitting in front of somebody who's also, you know, telling me their stuff, you know telling me their stuff.
00:30:33.201 --> 00:30:37.952
In a way, it's kind of easier to listen to somebody else and shelve your own problems and then come back to them later in the day.
00:30:37.952 --> 00:30:54.054
It really does prevent you from ruminating about your own worries because you have to pay attention, and so that was always harder in the first half of my career and much less hard in the second half.
00:30:55.500 --> 00:31:02.310
You know I'm wondering about the first part of your career as a young therapist.
00:31:02.310 --> 00:31:11.087
How do you get comfortable, meaning I imagine there's a lot of pressure on you to learn your craft.
00:31:11.087 --> 00:31:16.980
I mean, if you screw up, I mean I can't imagine what those consequences could potentially be Like.
00:31:16.980 --> 00:31:22.743
How do you get comfortable and what are those emotions early on?
00:31:23.464 --> 00:31:25.145
And what are those emotions early on?
00:31:25.145 --> 00:31:32.891
You have to be able to tolerate a lot, a lot, a lot of discomfort in the work.
00:31:32.891 --> 00:31:41.875
It's essential you can't take things personally and you have to be okay with screwing up and you have to own it.
00:31:41.875 --> 00:31:53.025
And I've screwed up and I've said to patients I'm sorry, that was the wrong thing to say, so I apologize.
00:31:53.025 --> 00:31:59.608
And if you do that, you're home free, because patients always know it's my experience at least, and especially with very sick patients they always know when you're lying or not telling them.
00:31:59.608 --> 00:32:00.791
They always know.
00:32:01.759 --> 00:32:08.054
Obviously, your clients unburden themselves with problems to you and you work through it.
00:32:08.054 --> 00:32:12.049
That's got to be a lot for any therapist, for you, for anybody else.
00:32:12.049 --> 00:32:14.688
So who do you speak to?
00:32:14.688 --> 00:32:17.127
Do therapists need therapists?
00:32:17.721 --> 00:32:22.550
In the beginning absolutely In the beginning I was seeing you have a number of different things.
00:32:22.550 --> 00:32:26.461
A I was blessed with a very good supervisor who I met weekly.
00:32:26.461 --> 00:32:29.326
B we had group supervision.
00:32:29.326 --> 00:32:32.232
C I had an outside group.
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