Virginia McCaughey, M.S.

Virginia K. McCaughey, M.S., is a clinical extern at the Boston Child Study Center where she provides supervised direct patient care in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) services.

Virginia earned her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Crime, Law, and Society from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. She went on to work at the Women’s Health Sciences Division of the National Center for PTSD at the VA Boston Healthcare System before earning her Master’s in Clinical Psychology from Suffolk University, where she is currently a fourth-year doctoral student. Virginia’s research interests focus on investigating risk and resiliency in the development and maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as well as identifying key contextual variables that hinder or promote recovery from PTSD.

Virginia has previously completed a clinical externship at McLean Hospital’s Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Institute (OCDI), where she worked with individuals in residential and intensive outpatient programs. At the OCDI, she conducted thorough diagnostic assessments, exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, and co-led a weekly Intrusive Thoughts group with intensive outpatient clients. More recently, Virginia completed a clinical externship at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety Disorders (CARD). At CARD, she co-led a weekly DBT skills group and provided individual outpatient cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to adults presenting with mood, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive and related disorders, and trauma-related disorders using the Unified Protocol (UP) for transdiagnostic treatment.