Psychology: Commitment to Individual and Cultural Diversity
The Doctoral Internship in Clinical and Community Psychology emphasizes a supportive and encouraging learning environment that prepares fellows to navigate individual and cultural factors in research and practice. This is accomplished by providing opportunities to fellows that raise awareness and increase their knowledge about issues surrounding individual and cultural diversity in clinical and community settings and to enhance cultural competence in clinical practice and research. Fellows learn more about themselves and continueto explore how the intersection of their identities and experiences influence and interact with their work as a psychologist.
This commitment is in accordance with our longstanding accreditation by the American Psychological Association (APA) Commission on Accreditation (CoA) for Health Services Psychology, whereby a commitment to individual and cultural diversity is one of five guiding principles and nine program-wide competencies for psychology training programs. The CoA defines individual and cultural diversity as including, but not limited to age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, language, national origin, race, religion, culture, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status.
Fellows and faculty in our training program are continuously advancing their professional development through team-based learning that prioritizes open, respectful communication to shape an interactive, engaged, and productive community, where individuals and innovation thrive. Our commitment to individual and cultural diversity ensures that there is a wide range of learning opportunities for fellows to strengthen their abilities in these areas. Our fellows can further deepen their education in this area on internship through our core seminars, placement-based seminars, supervised clinical and consultative experience in placement sites, and engagement with learning opportunities in our department, school of medicine and the broader university and community.
Core Seminar & Placement Based Seminars
In the internship core seminar, individual and cultural diversity are explicitly addressed in a series of sessions. These provide a common foundation of knowledge and shared learning opportunities for all fellows. These sessions cover topics of critical importance to working in behavioral health care settings and vary across years to reflect changing trends in the field and changing circumstances in the world in which we live. Recent sessions include: understanding diversity within the Greater New Haven community; individual and cultural diversity fundamentals for professionals; incorporating a focus on individual and cultural diversity early in the client engagement process; integrating cultural values into treatment; adapting evidence-based practices based on individual and cultural factors. Each of these sessions also provides ample opportunity for personal reflection and discussion. Additional sessions throughout the curriculum focus on diversity, health care disparities, and multicultural awareness. Examples of clinical work with culturally specific populations are provided throughout the seminar sessions.
The learning process continues in placement-based seminars in which the focus is on the populations served within each placement and specialty, as well as adaptations of treatment approaches for those populations.
Supervised Clinical & Consultative Experience
Much of what fellows learn during internship occurs through intensive, experiential and supervised clinical and consultative activities with individuals and communities that are highly diverse. The Greater New Haven Area is quite varied with respect to socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, culture, and many other dimensions. This variability is reflected in the individual caseloads and the community consultations of fellows during the internship year. These professional activities are supervised by faculty members who are knowledgeable about the impact of individual and cultural diversity on human development, mental illnesses and addictions, treatment, and recovery. Included in this is a focus on the impact of individual, cultural and ecological factors that influence inequities and disparities in access to health care and other social determinants of health. Many of the internship program’s faculty members have expertise in adapting treatments to meet the needs of different populations.
Developing Meaningful Connections to Yale and Greater New Haven
Most fellows who match to Yale’s internship program are new to Yale and to the Greater New Haven Area. Developing a meaningful connection with one or more of the many communities at Yale and the surrounding area can promote the health, well-being, and sense of inclusion experienced by psychology fellows. The internship program promotes linkages to these communities, some of which are described below.
Accessing Educational Offerings at Yale
The Yale Department of Psychiatry has a longstanding commitment to incorporating an understanding of individual and cultural diversity in clinical and community practice, research, and teaching. This focus is also supported by the Yale School of Medicine’s Office of Collaborative Excellence, which refers to the intentional collaboration of a broad range of perspectives and experiences. Each year, fellows are encouraged to deepen their education in individual and cultural diversity by participating in any range of educational offerings available in our department, School of Medicine, across the Yale campus, and/or our two clinical research institutions, Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) and the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC). Recent resources and communities fellows are involved in include, but are not limited to, the Accountability, Respect, Community and Humanity (ARCH) Task Force, Organization for Retention and Expansion, and the CMHC Health Equity Workgroup.
View the Full Competency Set
Access the Internship Handbook page where you can download the full set of internship competencies, including the behavioral descriptors for the competencies on individual and cultural diversity. Click on the "Core Competencies" download in the "Program Model" section.