Predoctoral Internship Training Program in Clinical & Community Psychology

Overview

The Psychology Internship Program in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine offers training in clinical and community interventions in three primary clinical sites:

Applicants to the Internship Program must select one of these clinical sites as their primary placement. 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 clinical sites offer different training opportunities, applicants to the Internship Program should review material describing each of the facilities, deciding which of the sites is most congruent with their interests and goals. Please note that several alternative programs within CMHC, YNHH, and the Yale Stress Center 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.

Program Model: Integration of Science and Practice

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. 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.

Program Goals and Objectives

Predoctoral interns receive broad and general clinical training in core competencies of assessment, intervention/prevention, consultation, scholarly inquiry/research and professional skills and development. Issues of diversity are interwoven throughout each of these cores. 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. Department-wide seminars provide additional instruction in the core competencies, as well as give the interns exposure to state-of-the-art research, clinical methods, key ethical concerns and issues of diversity, race, and gender. These seminars also provide interns, from different orientations and from different training sites throughout our training program, the opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences around their developing core competencies. Interns 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, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, VA Healthcare System, as well as in ongoing research projects.