Doctoral internship overview
The mission of The Emily Program is to provide exceptional care leading to recovery from eating disorders. Since psychologist Dirk Miller founded the Emily Program in 1993 in Minnesota, The Emily Program has become a national organization, providing a continuum of care from residential treatment to outpatient care for adults and adolescents and their families in four states. As leaders in the field of eating disorders, The Emily Program faculty shares in developing the most up to date and effective treatment in eating disorders through multiple research projects with the University of Minnesota. Further, The Emily Program faculty maintains expertise in the field of eating disorders by participating with the Academy of Eating Disorders, the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, and the Residential Eating Disorder Consortium to provide the most effective and comprehensive treatment, care, and training.
The doctoral internship emphasizes empirically-based practice within a multidisciplinary team in the treatment of adults with Anorexia Nervosa (AN), Bulimia Nervosa (BN), Binge Eating Disorder (BED), and other eating disorders. The multidisciplinary team includes psychologists, psychiatrists, primary care physicians, dietitians, nurses, social workers, and family therapists. We aim to train interns to be well-rounded generalists in psychology while also attaining a specialization in eating disorders.
Training philosophy and model
The Emily Program is proud of its emphasis on empirically-based treatment for individuals with eating disorders. We are the largest provider of outpatient "ED" therapy in the country in part because we believe in the need to work with clients on recovery in the context of their everyday lives. Respect for and trust in our clients is woven through every interaction that takes place at The Emily Program. It informs our thinking in our evidence-responsive clinical interventions: individualized treatment plans incorporate one or more of the evidence-supported therapies while also taking into consideration the need to pay close attention to the curative factors for change in the therapeutic relationship (Hubble, Duncan, and Miller, 1999). Our personalized approach to treatment also includes a multidisciplinary team of clinicians to address the spectrum of interconnected needs. In addition to individual therapy, treatment may include medical services, psychiatric care, nutritional rehabilitation and integrative complementary approaches such as art therapy and yoga.
Our focus on the individual needs of the client inevitably guides our core values as providers. We value a diversity of style and theoretical orientation amongst our providers and so place high value on each provider's intelligence, creativity, independent thinking and problem-solving abilities. The capacity to communicate and work well with each other is essential in our multidisciplinary teams. We rely on each provider's personal integrity and openness to growth and change.
Our philosophy of training, grounded in the local clinical scientist model (Stricker and Trierweiler, 1995), is thus consistent with our mission, values and clinical practice. The local clinical scientist model advocates that in addressing clinical problems, clinicians rely on their observations of the individual in context and upon solutions appropriate to that individual as well as upon the attitudes and knowledge base of the scientist. A local clinical scientist is "a person who, on the basis of systematic knowledge about persons obtained primarily in real-life situations, has integrated this knowledge with psychological theory, and has then consistently regarded it with the questioning attitude of the scientist." (Shakow, 1976, p. 554)
Just as we attend to the individual experience of our clients, we recognize that each trainee will come to the internship with their own unique strengths and challenges. Our aim is to support trainees in developing a nuanced and detailed understanding of their strengths and to gain competency in initial areas of deficiency. Interns are encouraged to focus on their development, not just in their clinical practice, but in their capacity for self-directed, life-long learning, including their capacity for self-reflection and effective consultation with other professionals.
We use a variety of methods to support interns in achieving identified goals of internship, including mentorship and individual and group supervision with a wide variety of professionals within the organization, didactic training seminars and clinical program team membership. Training is a developmental process where clinical and professional opportunities--as well as didactic training seminars--are sequenced to provide a cumulative and increasingly complex learning experience. For complete details on this internship, go to:
http://emilyprogram.com/for-health-professionals/doctoral-internship-in-psychology