Predoctoral Internship Training Program in
Clinical & Community Psychology

Overview

Predoctoral Training Program

The major aim of our predoctoral training program is to foster the student's acquisition of skills as a clinician, as a provider of clinical, consultative, and preventative services, and eventually as a clinical investigator. We emphasize the coordination of intensive, theoretically-based, supervised, clinical experiences with systematic evaluations of observations and assumptions made in clinical and community practice.

The Psychology Internship Program in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine offers training in clinical and community interventions in two primary clinical sites: 1) The Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC), and 2) Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH). Applicants to the Internship Program must select one of these two clinical sites as their primary placement. Predoctoral interns remain at their primary placement for the entire internship year, participating in the diversity of experiences that are available within that clinical facility. Thus, in the application to the internship program, you must select from among these two clinical sites, indicating which of the two sites (CMHC or YNHH) is of primary interest to you. Applicants who are interested in CMHC or YNHH as their primary placement must make further selections among several alternative primary and secondary placements within the CMHC or the YNHH, and this selection also needs to be indicated in the application. Since the two primary clinical sites offer different training opportunities, applicants to the Internship Program should review material describing each of the two clinical facilities, deciding which of the sites is mot congruent with their interests and goals. Please note that several alternative programs within CMHC and YNHH, have independent APPIC Program Numbers. Applicants should use the APPIC number appropriate for the site of their primary interest in applying to the Yale University Predoctoral Internship Program.

Because the student's primary experiences in graduate school have usually been in research and theory, much of the training of predoctoral interns in our program is devoted to clinical and/or community practice in an interdisciplinary setting where such efforts are highly valued. Clinical training activities, didactic seminars and supervision are directed toward developing clinical sensitivity and consultative competence and integrating these skills with basic theory and research. Within each of the two primary clinical sites (CMHC and YNHH), predoctoral interns receive broad and general training in core compentencies of assessment, intervention/prevention, consultation, scholarly inquiry/research and professional skills and development. Issues of diversity are interwoven throughout each of these cores. Thus, the goals of our training program are to provide intensive experience and training that will enable the student to develop skills and competencies in clinical and community practice and to develop the capacity to examine and evaluate the assumptions and observations made in this clinical practice.

Each predoctoral intern has a primary placement in one of the several clinical facilities of the Department of Psychiatry. Each clinical facility provides opportunities to participate in a wide variety of clinical activities with intensive supervision. The goals in each setting are to develop clinical and consultation skills at a high level, to learn to work collaboratively with other disciplines in treating individuals and families, to learn about different modes of assessment and intervention, and to formulate meaningful research questions related to these various forms of clinical activity. In addition to the core training experiences provided in each of the clinical facilities, all predoctoral interns participate in several year-long department-wide seminars offered by psychology faculty. These seminars provide additional instruction in the core competencies, as well as give the interns exposure to state-of-the-art research, clinical methods, and contemporary ethical including issues of diversity, race, and gender. These seminars also provide interns, from different orientations and from different training sites, the opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences around their developing core competencies. Fellows also have the option to participate in select training experiences in other clinical units, in elective seminars offered in the Department of Psychiatry, in didactic experiences within the Department of Psychology, Yale Child Study Center, and Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, as well as in ongoing research projects.

There are various opportunities throughout the University and in the Department of Psychiatry for predoctoral interns who wish to stay at Yale for further training at the postdoctoral level.

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