Dr. Eluterio Blanco, Jr. grew up in a Mexican American community in South Texas by the Rio Grande border. He didn’t foresee his career leading to where he is now, a clinical assistant professor and addiction studies coordinator at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. When he enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin, as a first-generation student on scholarship, he planned to major in engineering. He quickly discovered he was good at the math involved, but it bored him.
But “psychology was completely foreign to me,” he says. “I thought this is challenging. This is what I wanted to do.”
When he graduated, psychology degree in hand, Blanco decided he was done with school. He decided to continue his passion for psychology with only a bachelor’s degree by getting his license as an addiction counselor.
While it was partly a way to avoid graduate education — or so he thought — there was also a personal drive behind helping people with addictions. He saw substance use in his community, and he wanted to help.
“Early on, I caught on to the need for services, the need for treatment, the need for counseling,” he says. “Substance abuse was something I was always around – family, friends, just people that I knew – at least for alcohol use and maybe some other substances … I felt like it was just something very natural, not to confront it, but to really just listen, to just guide people through some kind of resolution for this disorder.”
Blanco went on to get his master’s degree in clinical psychology and his Ph.D. in rehabilitation counseling. (He now tells his students to never rule out a graduate degree.) As a researcher, he focuses on Latinx health practitioners’ attitudes toward addiction and how to reduce stigma. He just submitted a grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to train local health care providers in treating alcohol and drug use.
In the surrounding area, much of the Latinx community lacks health insurance or easy access to medical care, so people can find themselves in local clinics with doctors who carry biases, like believing people with an addiction are “lacking in some kind of morality” versus struggling with a public health problem, Blanco says.
