CAPS Internship: Clinical and Counseling Services Activities

Normal Operating Hours

Monday - Friday: 8am-5pm

Individual Psychotherapy: Interns build a caseload of approximately 12 individual client hours per week. Interns work with individuals from diverse backgrounds, presenting with a wide range of concerns. The majority of psychotherapy conducted at CAPS is brief in nature (approximately 4-8 sessions). However, interns will also carry two longer-term training cases. While contemporary brief emotion focused and relational perspectives are core to case formulation training at CAPS, interns are encouraged to integrate a range of psychotherapy approaches as indicated for individual cases.

Group Psychotherapy: CAPS offers many process, psychoeducational, and support groups which are led by staff and interns. Groups usually meet for 1½ hours each week and include interpersonal process groups and groups with specific memberships or themes (e.g. students with eating disorders, a support group for gay, bisexual and questioning men, academic difficulties).

Brief Screening Assessments: Interns provide two brief telephone screening assessments per week, the purpose of which is to gather essential information in order to make rapid disposition recommendations. Such recommendations may include an immediate emergency appointment, an urgent intake within 48 hours, a non-urgent intake, a group screening, online or workshop information, or a referral to a community provider.

Intake Evaluations: Interns conduct approximately five intake assessments monthly, although typically begin the internship year with two weekly intakes in order to build up a caseload. Such assessments are biopsychosocial in nature, and focus on both symptomatic and developmental content information, leading to a case formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.

Emergency and Consult Service: Interns provide 4.5 hours of emergency and consult service (ECS) per week under the supervision of a permanent staff clinician. The CAPS ECS provides University students and personnel with ready access to consultation and crisis intervention, both by phone and in-person. CAPS interns may participate in CAPS team responses to university wide crises as well.

Night Call: Over the course of the year, interns provide five total weeks of afterhours and weekend coverage under the supervision of a permanent staff clinician. These weeks are distributed throughout the year in the following manner: two 2-day weekday shifts and one weekend shift during the fall semester, four 2-day weekday shifts and two weekend shifts during the spring semester, and two full 24/7 weeks during the summer (at which time on-call volume is markedly lower).

Outreach and Community Consultation: Interns engage in a minimum of five outreach presentations over the course of the year, with one being originally created or organized material. In consultation with the Assistant Director for Outreach, interns will focus on a particular community in need at the University, and bring a cultural lens to the understanding of communities that have been traditionally underserved or reluctant to seek services due to historical or stigma related concerns. Interns will receive outreach supervision and training biweekly during periods of higher outreach activity, as determined by the Assistant Director for Outreach.

Supervision: Interns will provide one hour of individual or group psychotherapy supervision to a doctoral level practicum student over the course of the fall and spring semesters. Supervision provision follows didactic training in the Supervision Seminar (see below), and is supervised by a licensed psychologist at CAPS.

Assessment: Interns engage in assessment with students in a variety of ways, including intake and ongoing therapy assessment, as well as use of the Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms (CCAPS) used regularly as part of the electronic medical record.