Krista De Castella Email & Phone Number

Mount Macedon, Vic, Au

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

At Clarion Clinics, Krista works with a team of experienced professionals to deliver safe and effective outcomes for people suffering with mental ill-health through the use of assisted psychotherapies. The focus is on individually-tailored and extended models of care for treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.Clarion integrates the latest clinical research in this field with time-honoured approaches to compassionate and robust psychotherapy to deliver the leading-edge in assisted psychotherapy. The goal is to provide highly supportive and transformative experiences alongside tools and practices that promote lasting positive change.

San Francisco, California, United States

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an 8-week secular meditation program that introduces participants to a variety of simple meditation and movement practices designed to help cultivate awareness and resilience in day-to-day life. MBSR has been extensively researched since its introduction to Western medicine in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.DKrista is fully certified as a Mindfulness-based stress reduction teacher through the University of Massachusetts Medical School Center for Mindfulness. She has facilitated over 20 x 8-week MBSR courses and many mindfulness daylong retreats to groups of 10-40 people in a variety of locations in the San Francisco Bay Area including Adobe; the SF Stress & Anxiety Clinic; Jikoji Zen Centre; College Track; and at the San Francisco Zen Centre.

California, United States

Hosshin-ji also known as San Francisco Zen Center, was established in 1969 by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi as a training centre in the Soto Zen meditation tradition, open to the general public. Offerings include daily meditation and service, talks, classes, workshops, retreats, residential student programs, and mentorship. Tassajara Zen Center by contrast, offers rigorous monastic training in the Soto Zen tradition and is located in a remote part of the Ventana wilderness in California. The typical daily schedule at Tassajara consists of approximately 3-6 hours of meditation daily and various training in ceremonies, classes and workshops.Krista has spent over a decade deepening her training in mindfulness and meditation at the San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. In 2021 she also ordained as a Soto Zen Priest. With clients, she work mostly from a mindfulness-based, relational, psychodynamic and person-centred approach and her zen training and practice has had (and continues to have) a significant impact on this work.In an effort to increase her cultural and religious competence in clinical work, she also completed a year-long training in chaplaincy and spiritual care through the SATI Center for mindfulness in California. She also completed training and certification in the mindful schools program in California to better teach emotion regulation and mindfulness interventions to primary and high-school-aged kids.

San Francisco, California, United States

Seeds of Awareness is a non-profit organisation offering family and child therapy as well as Summer Camps, therapeutic support, social and emotional instruction for neuro-diverse kids. These social skills groups foster nourishment, healing and growth by cultivating connections with nature, peers and supportive counselors. Fiddlehead camps integrate mindfulness-, play- and nature-based interventions to support children and families. These summer camps are open to children from all communities and are inclusive and honoring of neurodiversity. Within Fiddleheads, Krista worked with small groups of 5-6 children (5 – 8 years old) to provide social, emotional and behavioural support. This included children on the autism spectrum and those with ADHD, sensory processing or emotion regulation challenges. She drew heavily from client-centred, mindfulness-based, play-therapy and family systems theories in this work.

San Francisco, California, United States

The San Francisco State University Psychology Clinic provides sliding-scale individual, couples and group psychotherapy to children and adults within and outside the university community. Within the clinic, Krista provided ongoing weekly psychotherapy to clients suffering from depression, anxiety, relationship and interpersonal difficulties. Kristaa also worked with couples seeking pre-marital counselling, as well as those seeking support and healing in their relationships. Through the SFSU clinic she worked with some clients continuously for several years and in this work, drawing heavily from EFT, ACT, psychodynamic, family systems and mindfulness-based interventions.

Stanford University

Stanford’s Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience (CAAN) lab examines neurobiological and behavioural mechanisms of vulnerability to cognitive-affective disorders in children and adults; and evaluates the effectiveness of a variety of clinical interventions. Within the CAAN lab Krista assisted in the recruitment and implementation of a randomized clinical control trial of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) for social anxiety disorder. This program of research involved training and experience in diagnostic interviewing, fMRI and behavioural data collection and analysis, training and adaption of MBSR treatment programs, as well as research and writing for publication.Current projects are focusing on mindfulness based meditation and CBT as clinical interventions for adults with social anxiety disorder and for suffers of chronic pain. Other research has also looked at compassion cultivation training programs and Vipassana meditation among prison inmates.

Since 1998, The Kristin Brooks Hope Center, founders of 1-800-SUICIDE, have responded to more than 4 million calls from people in crisis and are the pioneers behind the IMAlive Network. They have partnered with To Write Love on Her Arms, PostSecret, and the QPR Institute to launch IMAlive.

Assisted in the planning, recruitment, project management, data collection and research analysis. Other responsibilities included: the construction of online multi-media lessons for graduate students in social psychology, video editing and the development of online surveys.

Teaching courses in communications, public relations and multivariate statistics.

Private tutoring and guidance counseling with Indigenous Australian students.

Private tutoring, academic skills and guidance counseling with International students and Communications students at the University of Canberra.

Lesson planning and teaching at Yokkaichi Commercial High School and Kirara High - School for Students with Disabilities

Visiting Researcher, Psychology

Ph.B(Hons), Psychology

Activities and Societies: Amnesty International Golden Key

B.Comm, Communications, Public Relations (Psychology)

Activities and Societies: Golden Key Amnesty International Suicide Intervention Project (SIP)

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Clinical Psychology

Master'S Degree, Clinical Psychology

Doctor Of Philosophy, Psychology