In addition to rotations, interns in the Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center’s doctoral internship in clinical psychology will be involved with a number of didactic programs.
Summer Didactics Program
The internship program starts with an all-day hospital orientation involving staff from various medical disciplines. The orientation will address general hospital practices, such as privacy and confidentiality regulations, infection control, and security. In addition, the Department of Psychiatry and the Division of Psychology hold several days of orientation about your responsibilities as a member of the department. An online workshop will address the management of aggressive patients, emphasizing safety and de-escalation practices, as well as various regulatory and clinical policies and practices. You will also learn how to use EPIC, Mount Sinai’s electronic medical record system.
The didactic seminar component of the internship program starts with a series of weekly seminars focusing on the foundational competencies necessary for functioning as a professional psychologist within a psychiatric/medical center setting. Topics include risk assessment, psychopharmacology, interviewing about mental status, conducting clinical intakes, and recordkeeping. You will participate in these seminars separately and along with psychiatric residents, beginning a yearlong interdisciplinary collaboration.
Academic Year Seminars: Yearlong
Our didactic program provides in-depth study of selected areas of interest, prepares you to establish competencies in a number of professional capacities, and offers the opportunity to discuss, reflect upon, and integrate all aspects of internship training. Some seminars meet for 10 or 12 months, while others are short courses that meet for one to six weeks. Readings, case material, discussions, and feedback are part of the learning process.
Trauma-Informed Family Systems Therapy Seminar: This seminar addresses theories and techniques of family therapy, informed by relational, structural and strategic approaches, attachment theory, and the cultural context of couple and family therapy. This yearlong course teaches the theory, assessment, formulation, and intervention techniques used in family-centered and trauma-informed therapy. It takes a team approach, which means that the seminar involves live supervision of work with families and couples with team interventions through a one-way mirror. There is also a didactic component using video, role-play, empirical research readings, and case discussions.
Child Trauma and Resilience Seminar: This weekly seminar provides foundational knowledge of the treatment of child trauma and is grounded in trauma-informed, evidence-based models of treatment. Seminars include experiential training exercises, empirical research readings, didactics, visiting speakers, and case discussion. We draw from multiple approaches, including relational, trauma-informed engagement strategies, attachment regulation competency, trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, the Trauma Affect Regulation: Guide for Education and Therapy guide, and play therapy. This course continues all year.
Brief Psychotherapy Training: Research shows that the quality of the patient-therapist relationship (called an alliance) is the best predictor of treatment outcomes. Alliance-focused training, rooted in principles from interpersonal, intersubjective, and experiential therapies, aims to improve therapists’ ability to manage the therapeutic relationship by recognizing and addressing negative interactions with patients. This weekly seminar meets in small supervision/education groups for approximately 10 months. It focuses on helping you explore and regulate emotions, as well as recognize ruptures with patients. It also addresses the process of supervision. Supervision tasks include mindfulness exercises, learning rupture markers, and repair strategies. We use a variety of training methods, such as video analysis of therapy sessions and role playing.
Psychology Seminar: This seminar addresses a wide variety of clinical and professional topics determined in collaboration with the interns and aimed to fill in gaps in trainings. It runs all year. The following content areas are standard:
- Psychological Assessment: We discuss both child and adult testing in the context of current and relevant testing protocols.
- Substance Use Disorders: There is an overview of diagnostic and treatment issues with dual diagnosis patients.
- Ethical and Professional Issues: We survey these areas as they pertain to the profession of psychology, including risk assessment, child abuse reporting, and duty to warn.
- Gender and Sexuality: This is an overview of working with gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender, and queer individuals.
- Cross-Cultural Issues in Psychotherapy: This seminar focuses on the role of multicultural differences in the psychotherapeutic relationship, including working with Latinx, Asian, Black, and other populations.
- Supervision: This seminar is an introduction to the theories and techniques of supervision.
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy: We explore didactics and experiential training exercises to direct and enhance the practice of this approach in a group setting for individuals with personality disorders. Dialectical behavior therapy groups run by the interns will serve as clinical case material.
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: This seminar includes both didactics and experiential training so that interns develop competence in conceptualizing cases and designing interventions using this evidence-based therapeutic model.
- Group Psychotherapy Seminar: This mini-course focuses on psychodynamic principles of group psychotherapy (i.e., object relations, systems theory, and relational interpersonal). You will learn about the role of the leaders, co-leading, the therapeutic functions of groups, and how to manage difficult patients, among other topics. Case presentations and readings are included in the training.
Psychotherapy Seminar: In this weekly seminar that meets all year, you will present outpatient psychotherapy cases for discussion and peer supervision. We will ask you to show videotapes of your ongoing cases. The seminar pays particular attention to cases that are challenging with respect to therapy process and counter-transference. We will discuss empirical literature to enhance your understanding of clinical material.
Professional Development: The training director and associate training director meet monthly with interns to address professional development issues. We cover a variety of topics, including developing an identity as a clinician, licensure, private practice, post-doctoral fellowships, and career options. Mount Sinai-Behavioral Health Center offers two post-doctoral fellowship positions in our adult outpatient psychiatry clinic, which are available to graduating interns.
Interdisciplinary Case Presentations and Journal Club: Interns and psychiatry residents present cases to peers and senior faculty addressing diagnosis, treatment, or disposition. This forum also serves as a journal club where students present and discuss empirical research published in peer-reviewed journals. Participants choose the topics each month. This meeting occurs weekly in the integrated outpatient service.
Interdisciplinary Case Presentations: In this seminar, a psychology intern or a psychiatry resident presents a case, selected for its clinical interest, clinical dilemma, or teaching importance. The presenter focuses on pertinent aspects of the diagnosis and treatment, and, when possible, includes an interview with the patient by a senior faculty member. Senior faculty facilitates a multidisciplinary group discussion following the presentation. In the outpatient clinic, the clinical case conferences also discuss high-risk cases. This conference meets once monthly in the integrated outpatient service and weekly on inpatient services.
Morbidity and Mortality Conference: Once a month, trainees participate in this departmental meeting designed to find ways to improve individual skills or departmental functioning through an in-depth study of diverse treatment outcomes. This seminar runs for 10 months.
Psychology and Psychiatry Grand Rounds: Hour-long Grand Rounds presentations occur once a week for psychiatry rounds and once a month for psychology rounds, both for 10 months of the year. Topics include both clinical data and case material on a variety of clinical content domains and cutting-edge research by local and world-renowned scientists and practitioners. You may present a research or clinical topic at Grand Rounds either individually or as a group to gain experience in presentation skills in an academic setting and to build your CV.
Academic Year Seminars: Half-Year
Shorter seminars enable interns to focus intently on issues of diversity. Interns take both seminars.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Seminar: External speakers present on a range of topics such as policing issues in mental health, burnout, and racial justice activism. The seminar seeks to increase trainees’ awareness of how racism can manifest in the context of the psychotherapeutic encounter, increase your knowledge of models of burnout, and help you gain a greater appreciation of ways to work towards social change. This seminar meets weekly and includes didactic presentation, group discussion, and experiential exercises.
Racism, Culture, and Mental Health Seminar: This seminar aims to enhance your clinical practice, self-awareness, and cultural responsiveness in your work with diverse populations. Through examining your own cultural identities, and those of your patients, within the context of racism, culture, power, oppression, and privilege, this seminar will help you cultivate an intersectional lens toward your clinical work and will support your ability to collaborate more effectively with individuals and families from diverse backgrounds. This weekly seminar runs for the second half of the training year and relies on didactics, group discussion, reflection prompts, experiential exercises, and diversity case conferences.