Dr. Chris Celio

MEET OUR JUDGE

Dr. Celio is the Vice President of Clinical Programs and Interim Director of Training at The Hume Center. Dr. Celio, who started working in the mental health field in 2001 and originally trained to be a Child Psychologist, found his calling when he joined The Hume Center as a Doctoral Intern in 2007. While this shifted his focus to serving adults diagnosed with serious mental illness, he brought with him an emphasis on the family and other systems that the consumer is a part of and a creative spirit that believes that healing and recovery can come through many surprising and outside-of-the-box pathways, beliefs, and persons.

Upon licensure in 2010, Dr. Celio was hired as a staff psychologist in Hume's Contra Costa Outpatient Services and Partial Hospitalization Program programs and also provided supervision in the School Based Program. He has served as the Development Coordinator for Hume Center since 2011. In 2014, he partnered with Dr. Gilbert Weisman to create and implement the Community Support Program in East Contra Costa, Hume Center's first Full Service Partnership Program.

Dr. Celio also helped expand Contra Costa Outpatient Services to Prevention and Early Intervention by partnering with People Who Care to offer the clinical prevention, early intervention, and psychotherapy services within their groundbreaking afterschool program for high-risk youth in Pittsburg. He also helped Bertha Lopez launch Hume's Housing Support Services in 2018, which continues to grow larger and more impactful every year.

After experiencing the positive impact of bringing in speakers from NAMI  In Our Own Words, WREACH Speakers Bureau, Putnam Clubhouse, Rainbow Community Center, and RI International, he helped create Mental Wellness Night with the Sharks, where consumer and family member art was displayed at a San Jose Sharks game to help the fans experience what Mental Health Stigma and Mental Wellness look like artistically. From there, he joined the Community Living Room Conversation (CLRC) task force of the Behavioral Healthcare Partnership and helped produce four CLRC events, all of which included consumers, family members, and providers as equal voices around the table. Dr. Celio is proud to be part of the coalition of agencies that helped start the annual Hope Cup Softball Tournament and Annual Bowling Tournament, where consumers, family members, and providers involved at over eight agencies compete together to restore hope, reduce stigma, and show that we're all in this together.

He has been teaching at Contra Costa Behavioral Health's Office for Consumer Empowerment's SPIRIT Program since 2011 and has been recently teaching at SPIRIT and various other agencies and community forums on the topics of Communication Skills, Clinical Boundaries, Personal Boundaries, Self-Care/Burnout Prevention for Providers, Self-Care for Family Members, Making Friends and Getting Ready for Romance, Clinical Strategies and Ethical Guidelines for Telehealth, and Ways to Cope with Strong Feelings due to During COVID-19. He co-facilitated CCBHD's System of Care Meeting from 2014-2016 and creaeted a series of weekly Lunchtime Self-Care events in 2020 to help the mental health community cope through the Stay at Home Order. Dr. Celio is certified in Telebehavioral Health and is an Associate CPI Certified Instructor in Verbal Non-Violent Crisis Pevention.

Dr. Celio was proud to be awarded the Hope Award by the SPIRIT Classes of 2017, 2018, and 2022, the Community Partnership Award in 2018  and the Unsung Hero Award in 2022 by the Putnam Clubhouse, and the Committed Clinician Award by NAMI Contra Costa in 2019. He was honored to be chosen by Contra Costa Behavioral Health to moderate their first "Bust Stigma" event at Brenden Theatre for Recovery Month 2019, by Putnam Clubhouse to moderate their Reimagine Mental Health Care Conference in 2020 and 2021, and by TogetherWell to speak as a panelest during their "The Power of Support and Advocacy in Peer Mental Health" in 2021, and by Contra Costa College to speak at the Health and Human Services' Heartnerships Conferencee in 2022. He would like to remind everyone that "Hope has been proven to be contagious, so pass it on!"