Southwest Louisiana (SWLA) Pre-Doctoral Internship is an organized training program in professional psychology.  The program endorses the view that the contemporary practice of psychology requires an ever-broadening range of skills and competencies in order for practitioners to meet the burgeoning demands of today’s society.  The internship training philosophy is set within the bio-psychosocial model (Engel, 1977) and this model guides training experiences at every level of the program.  Training within the bio-psychosocial model begins with the assumption that illness and disease processes are multiply-determined by biological, environmental, social and psychological factors.  These factors contribute to disease and illness in a hierarchical fashion.  Each level needs to be addressed in order to effectively intervene within a person or system.  Changes in one area may also bring about changes in another domain within the hierarchy.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Further elaboration on the original model is made by Carr (1999) who states that each individual is a system of biological, behavioral, cognitive, sociocultural and environmental factors that constantly interact.  According to Carr, stress in any of these domains may disrupt the entire system.  When an individual is unable to compensate adequately for such disruption, problematic behaviors or symptoms may emerge.  Clinical work within this model is guided by the philosophy that all of the above factors need to be considered during assessment, case formulation and treatment.

Training occurs within the context of a behavioral health treatment center.  We provide training and applied experience in the assessment and treatment of psychological and behavioral disorders in persons, conjoined with clients manifesting severe mental illness. We have the working goal of producing intern graduates who use critical thinking to conceptualize human services within an outcome-driven bio-psychosocial recovery-oriented framework. We train interns to conduct psychological evaluations, formulate and implement therapeutic interventions, and use data to guide treatment decisions within the challenging populations of individuals with various mental pathologies and severe mental illness.  

 

Our training program considers, at a fundamental level, social, environmental, biological, cognitive, and behavioral factors in clinical care.  All activities involve an emphasis in helping interns ‘learn how to learn’ and to apply critical thinking and the use of empirically based treatments that will readily generalize to other clinical populations and settings. During the intern rotations, clinical supervisors provide direct learning experiences in assessment and treatment that will result in the intern having an advanced understanding of the effects of each of the above-mentioned variables on symptom manifestation and the development of behavior problems.  Results of the psychological evaluation are incorporated with evaluations from other disciplines such as neurology, general medicine, physical therapy, etc. to form a larger, integrated document that reflects a bio-psychosocial model of care and clinical case formulation. Clinical decisions are informed by knowledge from the extant scientific literature in concert with the practice of testing hypotheses on a case-by-case specific basis and the (related) importance of referring to objective clinical data (empiricism) in daily decision-making.

Carr, J.E. (1999). Proposal for an integrated sciences curriculum in medical education. Teaching and Learning in Medicine, 10, 3-7.
Engel, G.L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196, 129-136.