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Internship Program

Values & Principles of the Training Program

We believe that the provision of high quality predoctoral psychology internship training in clinical psychology is an important contribution to the field of psychology, mental health, and to the society at large. We feel that there is a continuing need for psychology internship training within medical schools affiliated with academic health science centers. These settings provide wonderful opportunities for professional development because psychology interns have access to contemporary equipment, theories, research, and techniques. Also, faculty and staff in these settings address mental health problems and treatments from multiple perspectives, and model the multidisciplinary collaboration so necessary in the treatment of complex disorders.

We view training in psychology as a developmental process. We plan to develop competencies in the traditional core skills of clinical psychology: psychodiagnostic testing; clinical interviewing; treatment planning; consultation; and psychotherapy. Our goal is to take the trainee with beginning psychology intern competencies, through mid-level psychology intern skills, all the way through advanced psychology intern competencies. The training is graded in complexity. We initially expose psychology interns to prototypic cases and then gradually introduce them to more complex differential diagnostic tasks and interventions with more difficult patients. Supervision is initially highly structured (involving direct observation and specific instructions) and gradually becomes less structured as the psychology intern becomes more skilled and capable of functioning with relative independence. Didactic seminars are also graded in complexity, and progress from basic overviews to advanced conceptualization and integration. Meaningful integration of clinical experiences, supervision, didactics, and role modeling is expected for successful completion of the psychology internship. Upon graduation from our graded sequence of training experiences, the psychology intern should be prepared to enter a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical psychology or supervised practice leading to licensure.

The education and training models that have come out of the major conferences were aimed primarily at doctoral training programs rather than predoctoral psychology internships. We make use of components from each of three recognized models: 1) the scientist-practitioner (Boulder) model which supports traditional university based Ph.D. programs in applied psychology; 2) the scholar-professional (Vail) model which supports the professional school movement and Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.) degree both within universities and free standing institutions; and 3) the local clinical scientist model which is less specific to the type of graduate facility. We accept applicants based on our assessment of their beginning competencies, supervisability, growth potential, professionalism, integrity, and goodness-of-fit and not the training model of the applicant's graduate school. Our training model is best conceived as a blend of what we feel to be the most relevant aspects of these three models.

We deeply value the scientific basis of psychology. It distinguishes psychologists from other mental health disciplines. The majority of our core faculty are involved in research.

We believe that the scientific values involved in multivariate approaches to prediction, psychometric foundations of test construction, probabilistic reasoning, hierarchical analysis, and healthy skepticism must guide clinical practice. We build upon these domains that were taught in graduate school by teaching psychology interns how to apply them in day-to-day clinical work.

We agree with Shakow's (1976) enunciation of the four types of observation which clinical psychologists must develop during their training and supervision: (1) objective observation (observation from the outside); (2) participant observation (which includes an understanding of the reciprocal effects of the observer and the observed); 3 subjective observation (empathic observation and intuition) and; (4) self-observation (self examination).

The priority of our psychology internship is to further develop, monitor, and assess clinical competencies and professionalism. Our psychology internship does not develop, assess, and certify to the public a psychology intern's competency as a scientist (i.e. ability to develop new knowledge in psychology) or provide each student "...with opportunities to engage in additional formal research that supplements the scientist-practitioner experiences" (Belar & Perry, 1992). Participation in research protocols is not emphasized during the psychology internship year. However, we do support dissertation work with elective experiences in research, academic leave time for oral defense, library and computer access, and the opportunity to present research to other psychology interns and staff for constructive feedback.

Since our psychology internship is primarily practice-oriented, it naturally shares many of the values contained within the scholar-professional (Vail) model. The emphases of our program on integration of practice and theory, clinical skill development, learning how to become a critical consumer of scientific literature, and learning how to supervise others are all consistent with the Vail model. Our entire psychology faculty deliver direct services to patients and thus serve as professional psychologist role models to psychology interns.

We share some important values with the local clinical scientist model (Stricker & Trierweiler, 1995). This model recognizes that clinical research findings may not generalize well to every clinical environment, and acknowledges the "decay" that takes place in the generalization process (Cronbach, 1975, 1992). The local clinical scientist model holds that it is necessary to develop local norms and knowledge in order to increase the utility and effectiveness of assessment and intervention strategies. The local clinical scientist model at the same time warns against dogma and rigidity, and encourages clinicians to develop critical judgment capacities, which remain aware of personal biases. Related to this concern are the important issues of diversity, and the dialectical tension between the nomothetic and idiographic approaches. Because of the cultural diversity in New Orleans, we must be sensitive to cultural factors, which may necessitate consideration of this variable in diagnostic and assessment approaches. We value the "differential therapeutics" conceptualization articulated by Clarkin and Perry (1984) which highlights the importance of tailoring interventions which best suit different age, cultural, socio-economic, and diagnostic groups. We also value a life-span developmental approach to the understanding of both normal and abnormal behavior, and make a concerted effort to expose psychology interns to clinical work with children, adolescents, adults, and older adults.

In summary, we emphasize the acquisition of psychodiagnostic, psychotherapy, and consultation competencies, with diverse patient populations covering the entire life span, through the modeling of these competencies by supervisors and intensive supervised experience. We are theoretically eclectic in orientation and prepare our psychology interns for postdoctoral training or the job market by fostering their movement towards independence in the delivery of high quality clinical services by taking into account the most recent research and clinical findings as well as changes in the mental health care delivery system.