The Psychology Department at The Behavioral Wellness Center at Girard, offers a Psychology Internship beginning July 1 and ending June 30, conducted on a full-time basis (2000 hours). Interns work within multi-disciplinary teams and will provide treatment to program participants with a variety of diagnoses, many of whom experience severe psychosis, intellectual disabilities, and personality disorders. However, interns will have the opportunity to work with people across all levels of care, at all levels of ego functioning, and across all stages of change. Each intern provides clinical services as part of an interdisciplinary treatment team on one of our inpatient psychiatry units. These clinical activities include individual and group therapy, participation and intervention in the therapeutic community and milieu, team meetings, psychological testing/consultation, therapeutic community meetings, staff training, and program development. Interns also provide testing and therapy services on residential or outpatient addictions programs, in response to consultation requests to help program participants address barriers to their recovery and to their engagement in the services provided on their units. In addition to these clinical activities, all interns participate in a core curriculum of seminars and supervision, including didactics, case conference, team meetings and clinical roundtable, and individual supervision. They also provide staff training and supervision for practicum students, and participate in program development and performance/process improvement projects.
The development of clinical skills is fostered in the areas of individual and group psychotherapy, milieu therapy, and psychological testing. Using person-centered, transformation, and recovery-based models of care; an informed, transtheoretical approach; and evidence-based and empirically supported practices as guiding principles, we integrate a variety of treatment orientations and services, including cognitive, behavioral, existential, humanistic, and psychodynamic theories and techniques; trauma-informed services; and referrals for public sector services. As partners in the change process we recognize our responsibility to be mindful of how our services will activate change processes; and how to adapt interventions to an individual participant's concerns, stage of change, and preferred level of change (symptoms, cognitions, relationship, and intrapersonal). And in developing programming we seek to ensure each person has the opportunity to experience these change processes in the format that is tailored to that individual's needs.