Education & Training | Psychology Pre-Doctoral | Training Sites | CT Mental Health Center | Outpatient Services

Outpatient Services (APPIC #118319)

Two predoctoral psychology interns are selected for a 12-month primary placement at the CMHC Outpatient Services (OPS). This training option is structured with a secondary placement within the Community Services Network (CSN). OPS also is a secondary placement option for interns applying for primary placement in another clinical setting.

The intern with primary placement at OPS will participate in providing mental health treatment to adult residents of New Haven with serious psychiatric disabilities. OPS maintains a continuous treatment program providing clinical services to clients who require longer term or ongoing care and provides occasional opportunities for briefer, more focused interventions.

The secondary placement within the CSN offers training opportunities in the development, provision, and evaluation of community-based clinical and rehabilitative services for individuals with serious mental illnesses. The training experience includes involvement with the overall administration of the network.

Primary Placement Structure

  • 12 client contact hours per week
  • The major portion of clinical time is spent in the provision of individual treatment with some time also devoted to group and/or family therapy

Secondary Placement Structure

  • 6 clinical hours per week
  • Usually devoted to individual treatment but may also include some group or family work

About the Internship Settings

  • In addition to clinical case management, psychiatric rehabilitation, assistance in coordinating community services and supports, and psychopharmacologic treatment, OPS provides various forms of psychotherapy. Individual, group, and family therapy are offered either on-site or in the community.
  • Most of the clientele who receive services at OPS experience multiple, co-occurring clinical problems as well as social stressors such as poverty, inadequate housing and benefits, and unemployment.
  • OPS clinicians offer multifaceted clinical services that are focused not only on ameliorating psychiatric symptoms but also on helping persons with serious impairments to build their lives in the community.

Internship Overview – OPS (Primary or Secondary)

  • Interns work as part of an OPS multidisciplinary treatment team – including nursing, social work, and psychiatry interns and staff - that bears clinical and administrative responsibility for a large number of clients. Team members, including psychology interns, practice within a primary clinician model, carrying their own individual caseloads, which are assigned by the team director.
  • Team meetings provide an opportunity for group discussion of general issues, difficult cases, and administrative problems. Each team also includes an attending psychiatrist who is available to psychology interns and other team members for individual consultation about medications and any other medical issues that may emerge.
  • Training caseloads are selected to provide a variety of treatment experiences as well as focused experience in a diagnostic area of particular interest. In addition, interns may participate in outpatient psychological testing, generally completing between 2 and 4 psychodiagnostic evaluations over the course of their internship.
  • As training is given high priority in the Division, interns participate in a weekly clinical case seminar that examines clinical, systems, and professional development issues, and in a variety of in-service clinical training seminars, in addition to the Department's regular core seminars.
  • A number of opportunities for collaborative research with faculty members are also available in the OPS to interested interns.

Internship Overview – CSN (Secondary)

  • The CSN is a consortium of 18 local community-based, not-for-profit organizations providing a broad variety of psychiatric rehabilitation services, including residential, vocational and social programming to individuals served within OPS and other clinical settings. CMHC is the lead agency for the CSN, and the supervising psychologists for this placement provide the administrative oversight to the network.
  • Interns focus on 2 or 3 specific initiatives chosen from among a diverse range of programs based on his or her interests and training needs. Roles and responsibilities of the intern will vary according to the chosen initiatives, but typically will involve participation in clinical consultation and/or training to the paraprofessional rehabilitation staff, program development, administration, evaluation, research and/or strategic planning initiatives.
  • Interns will join existing CSN committees (e.g., a service system coordination committee, a vocational services committee) relevant to their area(s) of responsibility and will be supervised by core psychology faculty members associated with the CSN.
  • It is anticipated that at the end of the training year, interns will have developed an array of skills pertinent to service administration and will have an enhanced framework for understanding the varied roles of psychologists in public sector mental health.
  • More information is available at: www.communityservicesnetwork.org

Supervision and Evaluation

  • Abundant individual supervision is provided for individual and group treatment. Interns receive ongoing feedback during the internship from their advisor and supervisors.
  • Quarterly formal evaluations are completed that serve as opportunities to review progress on training goals and address progress toward core competency areas.

For More Information

  • If you have a specific question regarding OPS as a primary placement training option, please e-mail thomas.styron@yale.edu.