Center for Neuropsychological Services Predoctoral Clinical Psychology Internship: Pediatric Neuropsychology Track
The Center for Neuropsychological Services offers a one-year, predoctoral internship in pediatric neuropsychology through the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry predoctoral clinical psychology internship program that is accredited by the American Psychological Association. The primary goal of the Clinical Psychology Predoctoral Internship Program is to prepare students for the general practice of professional psychology within a training model that is interdisciplinary, multicultural, and developmental in its orientation. In keeping with this primary goal, we provide training that is broad-based and general in its scope within the field of clinical psychology. Psychology interns completing our program will be well rounded and broadly trained to provide mental health services to children, youth, and families across diverse settings (e.g., inpatient, residential treatment center, and/or partial hospital psychiatric settings, various intensities of outpatient services; juvenile justice system; medical and school settings). In addition, interns receive training in a variety of assessment procedures, consultation, treatment approaches, (e.g., ecological/contextual, cognitive-behavioral, behavioral, solution-focused, social constructionist/narrative, object-relations, and family systems approaches), and treatment modalities (e.g., individual, group, family, milieu therapy). The internship accepts six interns per year and offers two tracks. There are five intern positions available with emphasis on clinical child psychology (Track 1), and there is one intern position available with emphasis on pediatric neuropsychology (Track 2). Intern applicants must specify to which program they are applying.
TRACK 2: EMPHASIS ON PEDIATRIC NEUROPSYCHOLOGY (One Position Available)
The purpose of Track 2 of the Clinical Psychology Predoctoral Internship in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center is to complete training in the general practice of professional psychology with emphasis on neuropsychological assessment of children and adolescents with a wide range of central nervous system disorders along with possible opportunities for consultation with medical, psychiatric, and school personnel. Based on Houston Conference guidelines, the Track 2 involves 50% of clinical time devoted to neuropsychological assessment. Interns in this track will have two major rotations: one at the UNM Children’s Psychiatric Center Outpatient Services (CPC-OS) and the other at UNM Center for Neuropsychological Services. Interns will devote 50% time in supervised experiences in clinical neuropsychological assessment through placement at the Center for Neuropsychological Services and 50% in assessment of and intervention with children, youth and families at the CPC-OS and one or more minor elective sites and 50%. Interns will take the same seminars as those on Track 1.
The intern will be expected to develop and hone their clinical skills regarding how to conduct clinical interviews that address neurocognitive issues associated with various neurological disorders, the designing of appropriate neuropsychological test batteries based on the patient and the referral questions, and administer, score and interpret a wide variety of neuropsychological tests/instruments for children and adolescents. The intern will also receive training in report writing and providing feedback to patients and referring clinicians. The intern will be expected to read assigned supplemental readings. The intern will also be encouraged to attend various Neurology or Neuroscience Grand Rounds. Supervision by pediatric neuropsychologists with extensive experience in the neuropsychological assessment of children and adolescents with a wide range of patient populations is provided on-site.
FACILITIES FOR PRIMARY CLINICAL PLACEMENTS
The core sites for training in the assessment of and intervention with children, youth and families are administered through the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
1. The Center for Neuropsychological Services (CNS).
The CNS provides inpatient and outpatient neuropsychological assessment services for children and adults with a variety of central nervous system disorders. Referrals for services are received from various departments within the UNM HSC including the Departments of Neurology, Neurosurgery, Pediatrics, Family Practice, Psychiatry, and Internal Medicine. Additionally, referrals are received from pediatricians, neurologists, and other clinicians throughout the state as well as from school districts across the state. The focus of this training experience will be on the evaluation of central nervous system function in individuals (young childhood through young adulthood) with neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., learning disorders, autistic spectrum disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), acquired brain disorders or chronic medical conditions (e.g., traumatic brain injury, epilepsy), with emphasis on diagnosis and development of recommendations to help ameliorate the impact of brain impairment on cognitive, social, emotional, and educational functioning.
Primary supervisors for this experience will be Rick Campbell, Ph.D., Dina Hill, Ph.D., and Andrea Sherwood, Ph.D.. Primary responsibilities of the intern during this full-year experience include conducting outpatient and inpatient (University Hospital, UNM Mental Health Center, Children’s Psychiatric Hospital, Carrie Tingley Hospital) neuropsychological evaluations, writing comprehensive reports and providing feedback/consultation to families, schools, and/or medical providers. It is also possible for some experience with adults with various central nervous system dysfunction. For example, CNS provides pre and post surgical neuropsychological evaluations for individuals with epilepsy. The intern may also have the opportunity to observe and participate in epilepsy pre-surgical Wada assessment and to observe neurosurgical cases. As part of the training experience, interns will have required and suggested readings assigned. Interns will also be encouraged to attend weekly Neurology and/or Neuroscience Grand Rounds, as well as Neuroradiology and Epilepsy Surgery/Neurophysiology case conferences. The CNS is actively involved in various collaborative research projects in which the intern may have the opportunity to be involved.
2. Children’s Psychiatric Center Outpatient Services.
Children’s Psychiatric Center Outpatient Services (CPC-OS), a division of the Children’s Psychiatric Center Inpatient Services (CPC-IS), provides an array of outpatient mental health services for children, adolescents, and families. An interdisciplinary staff offers community-based, home-based, forensic, and school-based programs for children between the ages of 2 and 18 presenting with a variety of psychological and psychiatric disorders. In addition to offering various therapeutic services, CPC-OS provides a variety of comprehensive services including case management, behavior management services and psychopharmacological interventions. CPC-OS is in the process of developing intensive after school therapeutic programs, which will provide other training opportunities. Developmental, systemic, narrative and community-based approaches are emphasized with cognitive-behavioral, family systems, solution-focused, psychodynamic, and object-relations orientations represented among CPC-OS’ clinical child psychologists, child psychiatrists, clinical social workers, and counselors. CPC-OS is a training facility for psychology interns, child psychiatry fellows, general psychiatry residents, social work students, medical students, counselors and art therapists.
Within CPC-OS, several outpatient service components provide opportunities for internship training:
Mental Health Services: Mental health services are delivered at a central outpatient clinic in Albuquerque serving European American, Latino, American Indian, Asian American and African American populations. Intervention often focuses on the family, the schools, and community agencies, as well as the presenting child or adolescent. Interventions include short- or long-term individual and family therapy, crisis intervention, evaluation and interpretation, group therapy, pharmacotherapy, and consultation.
In addition to broad-based mental health services to children, youth, and families CPC-OS provides clinical services to child victims of sexual abuse and their families. Sexual abuse services include crisis intervention, family and child assessment, individual and group counseling for children, parent counseling, behavioral management, and family therapy. A monthly sexual abuse forum provides ongoing supervision, case discussions, and sharing of information among community agencies.
Group Psychotherapy Services: Interns co-lead groups in interns’ area of interest with staff. Typical groups include those for survivors of sexual abuse (adult & child), social skills groups, parent-child dyad group for preschoolers, adolescent groups emphasizing gender and ethnic identity issues, therapeutic recreational groups targeting different issues or ages, divorce adjustment groups, parenting and problem solving groups.
School-Based Programs: The School Based/Community Based Program offers broad behavioral health services to Albuquerque Public School students and their families. Additionally, mental health services are delivered in community centers that serve families in the local neighborhoods. School-based therapists provide direct psychotherapy services, consultations to school and community personnel, psychoeducational services to parents, emergency evaluations for students, and help link students and families to other relevant services.
Psychological Evaluation/Consultation Service: Referrals for evaluations or consultations come primarily from clinicians at CPC-OS or selectively from other divisions of UNM's Mental Health Programs. Most evaluations focus on children, but some adults are assessed. Cases are assigned to interns based on both service and training needs.
Interns will carry a patient load between 6-10 outpatients.
MINOR ELECTIVE ROTATIONS
Minor electives are available in the following areas. An intern may choose up to three of these minor electives as agreed upon with the Internship’s Director of Training and the primary supervisor in the intern’s individualized plan of study developed at the beginning of the internship. Decisions about which minor rotations and how many, are made in the context of ensuring that interns on this track have broad-based training in professional psychology.
1. State of New Mexico’s Children's Medical Services (CMS) Cleft Palate and Endocrine Clinics
(Primary Supervisors for Cleft Palate Clinics: Luis A. Vargas, Ph.D. and Artemio Brambila, Ph.D.; primary supervisor for Endocrine Clinics: Robert Annett, Ph.D.).
The CMS Cleft Palate Clinics provide opportunities for interns to consult with children from birth to18 years of age with cleft palate/lip and their families in a multidisciplinary clinic that includes a plastic surgeon, a pediatrician, an oral surgeon, an orthodontist, a speech pathologist, and an audiologist. Five clinics are available (Farmington, Gallup, Roswell, Clovis and Albuquerque); four of these clinics serve rural populations throughout the state. The intern in each clinic is flown to the clinic with the multidisciplinary team in a state plane. An intern opting for this extra elective must agree to participate in 3 to 4 clinics for the year (i.e., one full day about every three to four months) at each clinic site. The CMS Endocrine Clinics provide opportunities for interns to consult with children from birth to 18 years of age with endocrine problems (e.g., diabetes) in a multidisciplinary clinic. The clinics are in Albuquerque and rural areas of the state. An intern can participate in 5-12 clinics a year.
2. Carrie Tingley Hospital (CTH) Inpatient Rehabilitation Unit (Primary Supervisor: Robert Annett, Ph.D.)
CTH is a pediatric rehabilitation hospital within the UNM HSC. The intern will have the opportunity to work up to 4 hours per week with a pediatric neuropsychologist within an inpatient rehabilitation setting, attend multidisciplinary team meetings, provide staff consultation, and perform bedside examinations.
REQUIREMENTS FOR APPLICANTS TO TRACK 2
Applicants to the Pediatric Neuropsychology Track must meet the requirements of the clinical internship program. Additionally, applicants for the neuropsychology track should have specific graduate level coursework and practicum experiences in neuropsychological assessment, including normal development of brain and behavior, child and adolescent psychopathology, assessment of intelligence, achievement, and psychopathology, neuropsychology, and supervised practica in child assessment and neuropsychology.
INTERNSHIP PROGRAM (Tracks 1 and 2)
During the first week of the internship, the intern is oriented to each training facility and develops a training plan for the year. The training director helps the intern match training needs with expectations of the program. The interns will be assessed in several areas of clinical psychology.
Core Experiences: The competencies required of all psychology interns are obtained through the following experiences: (1) cognitive, emotional, and social assessments of infants through adolescents, (2) family evaluations, (3) play therapy, (4) individual psychotherapy with children, adolescents, and parents, (5) group therapy with children and adolescents, (6) family therapy, (7) parent groups, (8) parent/couples therapy, (9) crisis intervention, (10) inpatient assessment and/or treatment of children or adolescents, and (11) consultation in a variety of settings (e.g., school, pediatric units, community agencies). These experiences occur in a variety of locations with different clinical, socioeconomic, and ethnic populations. If an intern already has competencies in some of these areas at the beginning of training, the intern may: (a) emphasize some training experiences and not others, (b) begin training at the intern's level of skills and learn more advanced skills within a training location, and/or (c) select optional training experiences as specialized areas of interest.
SEMINARS (Tracks 1 and 2)
Interdisciplinary Seminars: These are seminars taught by teams composed of a psychologist, a child psychiatrist, and a clinical social worker and required for child psychiatry fellows, psychology interns, and post-graduate social work fellows.
Psychotherapeutic Interventions with Children, Adolescents, and Families. The goals for this seminar is to develop specific skills in individual, play, family, group, and milieu therapy through a combination of lectures, role playing, videotapes, and observations of live sessions by faculty and other trainees. The seminar incorporates a multicultural and developmental perspective. Among the modalities covered are: Structural and strategic family therapy, solution-focused therapy, play therapy, and social constructionist/narrative therapy.
Ethics, Law, and Critical Reasoning. The primary focus of this seminar is on legal, ethical, and professional issues in working with children, adolescents and families and on topics of special interest. An interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective is taken in addressing each topic. Among the topics covered are: confidentiality and privileged communications, sexual misconduct, dual relationships, feminist therapy ethics, managed care, rural mental health, custody evaluations, supervision, and ethical guidelines for working with ethnic, linguistic and culturally diverse populations.
Multicultural Seminar. This interdisciplinary seminar is required for psychology interns, child psychiatry fellows, and social work fellows. The first part of this seminar is experiential and directed toward exploring our own attitudes, feelings, experiences, and values regarding cultural and individual diversity. The next part of the seminar includes didactic presentations and discussion of various aspects of cultural and individual diversity in psychotherapy and assessment of children, youth, and families. Traditional healers, such as American Indian and Hispanic healers, are invited to make presentations and demonstration in this seminar.
Interdisciplinary CPC-OS Case Conference
Special Topics
Pervasive Developmental Disorders
Neuroscience Seminar. This seminar exposes interns to the excellent neuroimaging technologies in our health sciences center, including magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), magnetoencephalograpy (MEG), and magnetic source imaging (combination of magnetic resonance imaging with magnetic encephalography) as well as more clinically relevant technologies including electroencephalograhy (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This seminar consists of presentations by clinicians and researchers regarding the application of these different technologies to the clinical practice and research of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders.
Methods of Consultation, Evaluation and Supervision
Applied Clinical Hypnosis for Children and Adolescents. The objective of the clinical hypnosis seminar is to introduce to psychology interns to hypnosis as a viable clinical tool for a wide range of clinical problems. The seminar will follow the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis standards for the content of workshops and courses. The seminar will address the definitions, history, and theories of hypnosis; myths and misperceptions of hypnosis; hypnosis and memory; presenting hypnosis to the patient; informed consent; ethical principles; professional conduct; certifications; principles and process of induction and realerting; principles in formulating hypnotic suggestions; demonstrations of hypnotic inductions; and applications to child and adolescent clinical populations. The instructor will provide supervised small group practice of hypnotic inductions.
Discipline-Specific (Psychology) Seminar:
Psychological Assessment Seminar. This advanced seminar assumes familiarity and experience with such instruments as the WISC-IV, MACI, MMPI-A, Woodcock-Johnson, McCarthy, Rorschach, TAT, and Vineland. The clinical application of these instruments with children and adolescents to develop treatment plans is emphasized, as is a multidisciplinary approach to assessment. Forensic, neuropsychological, and child abuse evaluations of ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse children and adolescents are also covered.
Psychopharmacology for Non-Physicians. The purpose of this seminar is to inform psychology interns about the major medications used by child and adolescent psychiatrists for the treatment of specific disorders in children and adolescents.
OPTIONAL SEMINARS AND INTEREST GROUPS
Other seminars and interest groups within the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry are available to interns. The Department of Psychiatry offers Grand Rounds every Friday with nationally and regionally recognized guest speakers.
EVALUATIONS
The training director, clinical supervisors, and intern formally evaluate the intern's progress and the training experience at the end of each rotation or twice during the year. The advisor helps integrate the evaluations by multiple supervisors, and discusses them with the intern at least every 3 months. The evaluations provide an occasion to alter an individual intern's program, when appropriate, and to improve the overall training program. Competency expectations, assessed by each supervisor for each area of training, are used as standards of the intern's progress and level of attainment. At midyear and at the end of the internship year, the training director integrates these separate evaluations into an overall written evaluation, which is sent to the intern's graduate program. An informal evaluation of each intern is held at three and nine months to provide early feedback and, if necessary, guidance to assist the intern in his or her progress in the program.
The intern evaluates each seminar and supervisor, and at the end of the year the intern evaluates the internship program. A training committee composed of psychology faculty, supervisors, and interns meets monthly to address training issues, planning for individual interns, and evaluations.
After the internship year, interns are contacted periodically in order to evaluate their long-term progress. Relative to psychology internship training goals, information is requested on current location and responsibilities, populations served, and self-ratings on skills used in current jobs. Also, with the intern's permission, other people may be asked to rate their current work in specific skill areas. These ratings are compared with the training goals required during the internship year in order to improve the internship program.
STIPENDS AND BENEFITS (Tracks 1 and 2)
Five individual stipends of $l7,500.00 are available through the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry for a 12-month, full-time internship from July 1 through June 30. The intern receives two weeks annual leave, two weeks sick leave, and one week professional leave. Health insurance is also available.
APPLICATION DEADLINE (Tracks 1 and 2)
Completed applications are due by November 15.
STARTING DATE (Tracks 1 and 2)
The July 1 starting date permits child psychiatry residents, and psychology interns to begin at the same time.