Clinical Psychology Internship 2012-2013

As of July 2008, the salary for the Lenox Hill Hospital Clinical Psychology Internship will be $21,000.

Lenox Hill Hospital offers three positions, full-time, for pre-doctoral Clinical Psychology Interns, beginning July 1, 2013. The stipend is $21,000, and includes a generous package of employee benefits. The program has been accredited by the American Psychological Association since June 1994.

The Setting

Lenox Hill Hospital is a Voluntary general hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side long famous for the quality of its patient care, offering a full range of medical services to both private and clinic patients and serving clients from every ethnic and socioeconomic portion of New York City’s population. The Department of Psychiatry is made up of some 70 staff and attending psychiatrists, and 24 staff and affiliated psychologists. There is an Outpatient Center for Mental Health, a 27 bed Inpatient Unit, and an active Consultation/ Liaison Service. Psychologists have important roles in providing service and training on each of these services. Lenox Hill has a long history of training psychiatric residents, medical students, and psychology trainees. Since 1981 the externship program has offered students a quality of experience and supervision that is among the finest in the city. In 1990 we introduced an internship for three students. With our state-of-the-art Inpatient Unit, we can offer every kind of clinical experience, including outpatient treatment at all age levels, group and family therapy, Consultation/Liaison services, and general and neuropsychological testing. We were very pleased that the APA recognized the quality and breadth of this training, awarding us provisional accreditation in our very first year and accreditation in 1994.

Internship Philosophy and Objectives

The aims of the Lenox Hill Hospital Psychology Internship Program are: training clinicians to perform a broad variety of services in a hospital setting; providing training experiences in both traditional and developing areas of clinical service; and providing the highest quality supervision of therapy and testing activity. The training model for the program is Generalist-Practitioner, consistent with the mission of the Hospital, which embraces and integrates every specialty area of practice into a comprehensive treatment facility.  We believe students must have a thorough grounding in the concepts of psychopathology, diagnosis, psychological testing, and the varieties of therapeutic interventions before applying to internship.  Our internship aims to expand on and add to all these dimensions of competence.  We offer students exposure to a wide range of treatment activities, testing instruments, and clinical populations, including all age ranges, inpatients, outpatients, and medical patients, of every socioeconomic and ethnic variety.  There is an equally broad range of supervisory experiences attached to this clinical work, including intensive and extensive didactic presentations.  We believe the best learning occurs in the context of a “mentor” relationship, and the supervisory staff work to be supportive, collaborative, and collegial with students.

Seminars and supervision are offered in psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy, CBT/DBT, psychodiagnostic and neuropsychological assessment, behavioral medicine, hypnosis, family therapy, group dynamics and psychotherapy, and ethical issues in the practice of psychology. Students will have the opportunity to present interesting diagnostic and therapy cases in the weekly case conferences, and will be closely supervised on all aspects of their work. Each student will have an eight-month rotation on the Inpatient Unit, becoming an integral member of the staff, with primary therapeutic responsibility for patients, and participation in all planning and therapeutic meetings. A rotation will also occur on the Consultation/Liaison service, with an emphasized neurology component. Students will carry a caseload of between 6 and 8 outpatients, and these will be divided equally among age groups. Students will be assigned to various groups, and will participate in group therapy supervision. There is a weekly practicum in Family Therapy, conducted by an experienced family therapist. It is expected that students will perform one diagnostic battery every three to four weeks. This assessment activity may take place on the pediatric, medical/surgical, neurological or other units as well as the Psychiatry unit. Recent Interns have averaged six hours of individual supervision a week, and attended six hours of seminars per week.

A general hospital has ample opportunity for research, and protocols related to a student’s doctoral thesis will be encouraged.

The Staff

The Psychiatry Department at Lenox Hill has undergone a tremendous change over the past 30 years, from being a Division of Medicine to an independent department. Our clinical services and training programs have expanded in proportion. The Psychology Section is currently composed of the Chief Psychologist/Director of Training, six salaried staff psychologists and 18 affiliated psychologists. The Department has specialists in adult, child, and adolescent treatment, neuropsychology, psychological testing, inpatient treatment, geriatrics, group, family and behavioral therapies. The primary orientation is psychodynamic, but a number of viewpoints are represented. Each member of the staff participates in the training of externs and interns by offering seminars or supervision.

We believe we have the experience and the staff to provide a very special opportunity to students at the internship level of training. Most of the staff have worked together for many years, and the department has a warm, collegial, and informal quality to it. This has made for an unusually personal and attentive atmosphere for our externs and interns.

The Program

The Internship year will begin July 1, 2013 and finish at the end of the following June. Time during the week will be flexible, depending on the workload, but it is expected that interns will be working 40 hours per week when their caseloads are full. The staff are committed to upholding the principle that training activities are of prime importance during the internship year. The intern should expect that additional hours will be needed for paperwork and crisis or emergency service. At least one evening will be devoted to seeing outpatients who must come after working hours.

Salary and Benefits

In addition to the $21,000 stipend, there are four weeks of vacation time, and a full benefits package, which includes sick leave and medical insurance.

How to apply

Due to the intensive clinical nature of the training, the program is open only to pre-doctoral students in clinical psychology.

Lenox Hill uses the APPI Online application form, and all submission materials must be made through this process.  We ask for three letters of recommendation along with the CV.  Applicants will need experience in child therapy to be strongly considered.

This internship has agreed to abide by the APPIC policy that no person at this training facility shall solicit, accept or use any ranking-related information from any intern applicant.

All material must be received by November 15, 2012.

Questions: wwelton@lenoxhill.net

Lenox Hill Hospital’s Clinical Psychology Internship is accredited by the:
Commission on Accreditation
American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002
(202) 336-5979