Program Setting
The Clinical Psychology Internship Program at Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West is designed to provide interns with a yearlong, intensive, clinical experience with diverse patients in a wide range of clinical settings.
Our Internship Program is located in hospitals of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which is internationally renowned for its outstanding research, educational, and clinical care programs. Icahn Mount Sinai is the sole academic partner for the eight member hospitals of the Mount Sinai Health System, including Mount Sinai Morningside, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Mount Sinai West, in Midtown Manhattan. The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary system, which includes two emergency rooms (with Comprehensive Psychiatry Emergency Programs), three inpatient units, two outpatient clinics (child and adult), a therapeutic school and milieu for adolescents, a parent-infant intervention program, community outreach services, intensive outpatient treatment programs, specialty psychiatric clinics, a full continuum-of-care substance abuse facility, a dedicated clinical research unit, and a consultation-liaison psychiatry service (throughout the Hospital Center). There are more than fifty staff psychologists who participate in the Internship Program, as supervisors, administrators, clinicians, teachers, and researchers. Adjunct psychology faculty members also teach and supervise in the Internship Program.
Philosophy and Goals
In facilitating interns’ proficiency to function as independent, generalist psychologists, the Internship Program is dedicated to developing certain core competencies. These are competencies in: (1) research skills; (2) ethical and legal standards; (3) multicultural awareness; (4) professional values, attitudes and behaviors; (5) communication and interpersonal skills; (6) assessment skills; (7) models for intervention including evidence-based methods; (8) supervision skills, and (9) consultation and inter-professional/interdisciplinary skills.
Aims and Competency Development
Training in various diagnoses and modalities of evidence-based psychotherapy and assessment is integral to this process. An integrative treatment approach—combining psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, systems, ethno-cultural, developmental and medical model perspectives—is emphasized. This approach is taught, and practiced by psychology interns, throughout the various clinical placements and didactics. Within this approach, an attempt is made to individually tailor each intern’s experience in accordance with their interests and goals. Ongoing program planning and evaluation involving the interns and their supervisors are an integral part of the program. Interns are encouraged to assume a gradually increasing degree of professional responsibility and autonomy as the year progresses.
The Internship Program is guided by the tenets of the practitioner-scholar model. Our primary focus is on developing the intern’s capacities to deliver clinical psychological services. This is implemented through supervised clinical experience and courses. Empirical and theoretical psychological literature is the core of our experiential and didactic training. Thus, we emphasize evidence-based intervention and assessment, empirically-validated psychological theory, and methods of scientific inquiry and analysis in our training and services. As Rodolfa et al. (2005) observe: the practitioner-scholar model “emphasizes the development of reflective skills and multiple ways of knowing in the practice of psychology, and it stresses clinical practice and the importance of theory and the use of research to inform practice.” (Rodolfa, E. et al., 2005, Internship training: Do models really matter? Professional Psychology, Research and Practice, 36(1), 25-31).