ABSTRACT
Introduction: e Program Director’s Role In the summer of 1986, my colleague Sherry Zitter and I were hired to establish a psychiatric inpatient unit for deaf persons at Westborough State Hospital in Massachusetts. At that time, I had a master’s in “Counseling of the Hearing Impaired” and 3 years post-master’s experience as a vocational rehabilitation counselor with deaf persons. Sherry was a licensed social worker specializing in working with deaf people. We are both hearing. We are also friends. When we found out that we were the two nalists for the job, we faced a dilemma. As friends, we did not want to compete against each other. We both placed the survival of our friendship higher than getting the job. We both also had a fair amount of chutzpa, so the weekend before the nal interviews, we got together and redesigned the job. We turned it into two jobs, one that she could do and one that I could do, and we proposed that they hire us both as codirectors. To our astonishment, the interviewing team bought the idea, and we both began the exciting project of creating this new specialty Deaf mental health program (Glickman, 2003; Glickman & Zitter, 1989).
