Profile of Dr. Alec Cecil
A retired psychologist is now a volunteer disaster mental health manager for the American Red Cross
By Peter Aronson
The Practical Altruism Project
Published on December 2, 2024
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If you examine Alec Cecil’s professional trajectory, even before he became a practicing psychologist, there’s clear evidence that Alec was destined to do important work helping and soothing other people.
From early on, before graduate school, even before college, Alec was developing a reputation for assisting others who had troubling personal issues or larger, emotional barriers to overcome. I know, because I have known Alec for almost 60 years and as early as high school, friends looked to him for advice.
Alec developed a reputation for being easily approachable and always willing to talk. As a high school senior, he joined a peer counseling program, where he began learning basic counseling skills. This led him to study psychology at Yale, where he eventually became a freshman counselor, helping new students deal with social and emotional issues as they adjusted to college.
Whether he was acting as a mentor or a counselor, Alec was on his way to working with and assisting a lot of people. This led to a 35-year career as a psychologist at nonprofit mental health centers, primarily helping adolescents from underserved backgrounds, mostly in the Bronx. This would serve to be good training for his after-career, as a practical altruist working as a volunteer disaster mental health counselor and manager with the Red Cross, applying the skills he honed for decades. The 68-year-old psychologist has been a Red Cross volunteer now for more than 20 years.
A calm, reassuring presence
Early on in his career, before he even went to grad school, Alec exhibited the kind of calm that would be a hallmark throughout his career.
Alec’s first job out of college was working as a mental health worker on an adolescent in-patient psychiatric unit in a hospital in White Plains, New York. Alec’s entry-level job was to monitor and chat with patients on the unit and to escort them to and from activities. One day, a patient, who had previously escaped from the facility, told Alec he wanted to talk with him in his room. Alec, who was 22 at the time and years from being a psychologist, went to the room and after the door was closed, the young man pulled out a jagged piece of glass and held it to his throat.
“He said to me, ‘Give me your keys or I’m gonna kill myself or cut myself.’ I don’t remember the exact words. And I said, ‘Well, let’s talk about this.’ And then he moved the glass closer to his throat.”
Alec remained calm, stalled and noticed the patient was not wearing shoes.
“You don’t have your shoes on,” Alec recalled telling him. “Let me go see if I can find them for you.”
Alec was able to leave and inform a supervisor. Staff calmed the patient and the matter was resolved without injury. The chief psychiatrist on the unit later wrote Alec a recommendation to graduate school, saying that Alec had "exhibited grace under pressure."
Grace under pressure, an Alec Cecil hallmark that would serve him well.
Becoming a psychologist
Alec earned his Ed.D. (Doctor of Education) in counseling psychology from Columbia. After several years working as a staff psychologist for facilities in Long Island, then the Bronx, providing individual and group therapy for adults and adolescents, Alec embarked on a long tenure to help kids in underserved communities. He said he was fortunate to have the financial means to work for nonprofits.
“I wanted to give these kids a therapeutic option that they might otherwise not have, because they couldn’t afford to go to a private therapist,” he said.
For 20 years, until 2013, Alec was a psychologist at the Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center, part of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Alec did individual therapy and also ran a group treatment program, primarily working with adolescents and their families. He also supervised graduate and medical students and taught at the Einstein medical school. He helped establish several health clinics at schools in the Bronx.
Most of the kids Alec saw had developmental disabilities and faced difficult circumstances. And while he said he did not do disaster work, many of the individuals he saw faced personal disasters.
“Pretty much everybody I saw were from low income families, dangerous neighborhoods or difficult living situations,” he explained. “I probably saw more people who lived with neither biological parent than who lived with both biological parents. The kids lived with single parents, grandparents, foster parents, adoptive parents. They had lost family members, there were all kinds of struggles.”
He recalled taking knives away from adolescent patients, dealing with drug issues and having to calm individuals in group settings when violence was threatened.
It was real-world crisis management in the Bronx, he said, coupled with a treatment approach that involved school outreach and a flexible treatment program outside of formal therapy.
Dealing with these hardcore real-world problems was good training for Alec when he was ready to move on.
A volunteer career with the Red Cross
After Alec’s three children got older, he decided he wanted to be involved in disaster relief work as a volunteer. He turned to the Red Cross because of its reputation for doing important work in times of crisis and because he knew he couldn’t just show up at a site and offer help without an affiliation. He began taking Red Cross training courses in disaster response and crisis intervention, a requirement before service. His first assignment came in November 2001, when he was sent to the site of an American Airlines plane crash in Queens that killed 265 people.
“I was brand new, I didn’t know much about how things worked at the Red Cross,” Alec explained, characteristically unemotional in explaining his involvement in the aftermath of one of the deadliest air disasters in U.S. history. “I just tried to provide as much comfort as possible to relatives of people who had died.”
After Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Alec was asked by the Red Cross to provide comfort to victims on the phone. His first national deployment came a few years after he retired from his work at Einstein College of Medicine. In August 2016, he was sent to Baton Rouge to help the victims of flooding that had ravaged the community, the worst natural disaster since Katrina at the time. Alec worked in what was called a mega-shelter, which housed 1,000 people impacted by the flooding, providing counseling and information.
Danel Lipparelli, a senior Red Cross mental health manager overseeing deployment, said Alec is someone she sends early on to the “high-level disasters” because he’s calm and he doesn’t break under the pressure, citing how he handled an attempted suicide by a volunteer and such volatile situations like when a hundred volunteers were sleeping in a shelter and there was no water or electricity, tornadoes were active in the area and there was limited access to food.
“It’s crazy out there,” said Lipparelli, who has done 86 deployments herself as a volunteer. “And to be able to have someone like Alec, who can meet the pace and the needs and get the job done and be kind about it. It’s just really crucial.”
In August 2017, Alec was sent to Houston to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, when flooding displaced more than a million people. An experienced Red Cross colleague, Vivian Moy, who has deployed to many national disasters, observed Alec counseling families in a shelter and said he has a great sense of how to talk to victims of such trauma.
“Alec is sitting with them and counseling them and with his professional background, he can recognize when a brief conversation is not enough," she said. "He can recognize the things that they say that’s going to throw up the red flag.”
She said Alec has helped her get through tough times.
“Working at Hurricane Harvey, I was in a really stressful support position and I remember he came over to me and we were in the middle of the office and you know, he just started talking to me and all of a sudden I started crying.
“So I can tell you Alec’s demeanor, his delivery, his choice of words, his style of communicating that includes those all important pauses, that he works into the conversation to let the person process, his patience, his absence of how do I describe this? His absence of eagerness to fix you. His genuine warmth and compassion and intuition and humor. It all contributes to the kind of service delivery that we strive to give every single person we take care of in a disaster.”
Alec’s next national deployment was soon after, in October 2017, when he was sent to Las Vegas following the shooting at the Harvest Music Festival, where 60 people were killed and 413 were wounded, making it the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“It was obviously a terrible tragedy,” Alec said, explaining that he counseled survivors at a local hospital and also at a family assistance center. Alec also spent three days at the Las Vegas police department, calling officers, all of whom were affected in some way by the incident.
In 2018, Alec was sent to Parkland, Florida, after 17 students and staff were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This was the first time he was sent to the scene of a school shooting.
He worked at the Red Cross’ family assistance center, he said, trying to provide comfort to students, families and school staff, and helping connect them to long-term care where needed.
He said he found this deployment so emotionally upsetting that when he got home and found some privacy with his wife, Diane, he started crying.
“You have to deal with the sadness,” Alec said. “It’s part of the challenge, how you maintain your empathy and your compassion and yet not get overwhelmed. The sadness is there, clearly more for mass casualty settings.”
While the mass casualty events involving natural disasters and mass shootings receive national attention, much of Alec’s volunteer deployment, like many Red Crossers, is on the local level at tragedies that receive scant attention. Alec, who lives in the New York City metro area, has provided counseling and oversight at scores of local disaster scenes, such as train, plane and car crashes, and house and apartment fires.
Mary Davis, the Disaster Action Team coordinator for the New York City metro area, said Alec is on the top of her list of Red Cross disaster mental health volunteers she calls to a site.
“He’s one of the most well regarded disaster mental health professionals in the country,” Davis said, explaining that she has worked with Alec at dozens of local disaster scenes, including a Bronx River Road apartment fire in Yonkers in March 2023, when one person died, as many as 60 families may have lost their home and 32 firefighters were injured.
“He comes to a disaster location and evaluates the entire scenario in a dual role,” she said. “One, to provide emotional support for families that are displaced and two, to support the volunteers who have been working for hours in a high-trauma environment.”
At a non-fatal apartment fire in Yonkers in 2019, Alec explained to a reporter how he counsels people who have suffered through a crisis, in this case where they may have lost their home and/or a pet. “We want to be reassuring, but only realistically so,” he told the Rockland/Westchester Journal News. “You don’t want to just say, ‘Oh, everything’s going to be fine,’ because you don’t know if everything’s going to be fine. What I can say is, ‘I know that most people are resilient and get through situations like this and it’s very likely that you will
too.’ ”
During Alec’s time at the Red Cross, he has risen from a service counselor to a supervisor to a mental health lead manager for the Greater New York Region. In this capacity, Alec is often the lead mental health manager on site, helping assess the mental health needs on the ground and assigning counselors. He also monitors the condition of his fellow Red Cross workers, monitoring their emotions and how they’re coping.
Davis, who has been a Red Cross volunteer for 14 years, credits Alec and other disaster mental health workers on his team with her longevity.
“It’s hard to see trauma a lot,” Davis said, explaining that she’s had many phone calls with Alec where she is crying on the phone following work at a disaster scene. “I credit Alec and his team for enabling me to continue doing my job, as opposed to becoming too fatigued from the trauma to continue.”
As a lead manager, Alec also is involved in planning and providing disaster mental health training. This is all part of his volunteer work, for which he receives no compensation.
In addition, Alec has been deployed to work with the military in Europe and in the New York area. The Red Cross has a long history of assisting military personnel and their families and veterans. Alec has led resiliency workshops at local and international bases helping soldiers and their families with such things as communication skills, deployment issues, stress reduction, anger management, trauma and depression, and how to talk with children.
Lallita Maharaj, a paid supervisor in the Red Cross’ Armed Forces Division, said she has brought Alec on to teach workshops to the military community more than a dozen times, citing his kindness, compassion and calm demeanor.
These traits “make it very easy for someone to connect with him,” she said.
Among Alec’s recent national deployments, he was sent to Texas in 2022 after the school shooting in Uvalde and to Maui in summer 2023 following the wildfires. There were 500 Red Cross volunteers housing and helping 7,000 people in Maui, he said.
In 2024, Alec has been unusually busy with Red Cross responsibilities, attending and teaching at disaster mental health conferences; teaching psychological first aid to New York City emergency responders and new Red Cross volunteers; training mental health support staff for the U.S. Army in Stuttgart, Germany; working with the Red Cross’ disaster mental health call center, as a manager and as support staff, answering calls; and in August, being deployed for 10 days to Georgia and South Carolina following flooding caused by Tropical Storm Debby, and then a few weeks later, being deployed to Florida, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene as a disaster mental health manager.
His responsibility is to organize the counseling personnel to help the victims of these disasters, he said, as well as to make sure his volunteer team is taken care of emotionally and personally. He said collaboration with other Red Cross units, such as operations, health services and spiritual care, is a key component to his work.
He called all these disaster experiences terribly sad, humbling and a learning experience every time he’s deployed.
“There’s only so much you can do to help with our counseling. We can’t take away whatever happened,” he said. “Nobody can go back in time. A lot of these folks, survivors and relatives and friends of victims, are changed forever. We can, though, I sincerely believe, help people get through some very tough days. There’s no magic. We’re there, we assist, we do some basic mental health interventions. A lot of it is just being there with the victims. There’s evidence that by doing this, we can help them avoid, in some cases, longer term consequences. At least that’s my hope.”