Pre-Master’s Mental Health Internship – San Francisco

We are committed to nurturing and integrating diversity training into all aspects of our training program by:

Providing interns with opportunities to work with patients who represent various aspects of diversity, including age, religion, gender, disability status, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, values, and lifestyle.

Placing a high value on interns’ willingness to engage in self-reflection, and supporting the exploration of attitudes, beliefs and therapeutic postures that could impact clinical interactions.

Maintaining a consistent focus in clinical supervision on expanding interns’ multicultural awareness and competence in the provision of psychotherapeutic services and cultivating a sense of inclusion and belonging in the workplace.

Encouraging interns to participate in the Regional Mental Health Training Program Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Committee’s seminars related to cultural sensitivity and competence as their schedules permits.

Interns will attend didactic seminars within their clinics and have opportunity to attend regional seminars organized by Mental Health Training Programs as their schedules permit. Didactics will cover a range of clinical and professional development topics as well as explore culturally responsive care. Interns will have access to both live and asynchronous exposure to various speakers and topics which are designed to meet their developmental needs over the course of the training year.

Interns may attend all-staff department meetings, treatment team meetings, and weekly feedback informed care case consultations.

Bereavement Track

The intern would attend:

• Weekly Hospice Department staff huddle
• Monthly bereavement department case consultations
• Weekly trauma consult hour offered through MHTP (attendance encouraged)
• Opportunities to view recorded trainings from Regional MHTP’s continuing education lecture library if the intern’s workdays do not coincide with days that live training seminars are scheduled

All interns are supervised by licensed mental health professionals who are responsible for overseeing the direct delivery of clinical services. The supervisor takes a role in developing the intern’s learning plan, monitoring their progress, and evaluating their training schedule. The supervisor is also responsible for completing the intern’s evaluation.

Interns will receive a minimum of one hour of individual supervision a week. Two hours of individual supervision will be provided for every 20 hours of service provision at minimum. Interns will also receive at least one hour of group supervision per week which may include case consultation, and topics related to professional development, interdisciplinary communication and systems issues, and multicultural competence and diversity awareness.

Bereavement Track

Weekly individual supervision

Pre-Masters interns will have the opportunity to learn specialty treatment of all diagnoses of eating disorders, participate in multi-disciplinary eating disorders clinics in pediatrics and adult & family medicine, co-facilitate groups in the eating disorder intensive out-patient program (EDIOP) and do community education and outreach on the prevention and treatment of eating disorders.

The Bereavement Department offers services to the identified bereaved (i.e. the family, friends, and caregivers) of patients who pass away while enrolled in Kaiser East Bay Hospice services. The Bereavement Department provides proactive outreach to these bereaved including offering a compassionate presence, mailing educational materials throughout the year following their loss, support groups, weekly workshops, and individual grief counseling. The Bereavement Department also offers these services to any adults in the community who are interested, regardless of insurance status. All services are free of charge.

The pre-master’s intern participates in the provision of all of these services, including co-facilitating grief support groups with a licensed clinician, presenting at a weekly grief educational workshop attended by 50+ participants, and providing individuals with short-term individual grief counseling.

The intern works with the Training Director to assess and identify individuals who are appropriate for short term grief counseling vs those who require a higher level of care and long-term therapy support.

The intern provides individual grief counselling to a maximum of five clients per week and assists in planning an annual memorial for hospice and community bereaved. The intern also assists with additional programmatic duties as appropriate/desired. The intern is encouraged to identify and implement additional grief support programs and ideas in collaboration with the Training Director.