Vicki Marcum, LCSW

Vicki Marcum is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) with four decades of hands-on experience in mental health care. She uses a client-centered way of starting therapy, then adds practical strategies that match each person’s needs. Her style is compassionate and straightforward, with room for both gentle support and honest challenge.

Over 40 years Vicki has worked across many settings in Illinois, including inpatient psychiatry, outpatient community mental health, emergency and crisis intervention, schools, and churches. She has worked with people in outpatient day treatment and extended day programs, and in-home services and private practice. This variety informs how she adapts her approach.

Vicki draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. She also uses attachment-based ideas to address relationship patterns and client-centered methods to shape sessions around each person’s pace. Emotion-focused and existential perspectives inform deeper conversations about meaning and feelings.

She has worked with a wide range of concerns, including stress, anxiety, trauma and abuse, grief, parenting questions, depression, relationship and family issues, eating and body image, anger, self-esteem, career concerns, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and coping with life changes. Additional focuses include adoption and foster care, attachment issues, blended family concerns, and family-of-origin dynamics.

Vicki helps people talk through options and discover their own path forward. She aims to build trust first, then use the approaches that fit the person and the problem. Sessions may include practical exercises, emotional processing, and direct conversation about beliefs and choices.

Therapeutic approaches adapted for online care

Vicki commonly uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people identify and change patterns of thinking and behavior that cause distress. CBT often includes clear exercises and practical homework to try between sessions, which fits well with brief video or messaging check-ins.

She also draws on attachment-based therapy to look at how early relationship patterns affect current connections. That work focuses on emotions and interaction styles, which can be explored effectively through conversation and reflection in a virtual session.

Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will begin by listening to your concerns and goals, and then suggest methods that match your needs and personality. You and the therapist can try a few ways of working and adjust as you go, aiming for what feels most helpful.

Online therapy offers flexibility across several formats: video calls for face-to-face conversations, phone sessions when video isn’t practical, live chat for brief back-and-forth, and text-based messaging for ongoing check-ins. Video is useful for in-depth work and emotional exploration, phone can fit into a busy day, and messaging makes it easier to touch base between sessions. These options make it simpler to fit therapy into a real-life schedule while keeping the focus on progress and practical steps.