Doctoral Internship

Walnut Creek

Walnut Creek is a city of about sixty-seven thousand residents, located 25 miles East of San Francisco, 8 miles from Berkeley and Oakland. It is known for its small-town vibe, vibrant downtown, arts and parks, top notch schools, and for its spectacular surrounding hills. Mt. Diablo, with its unmistakable profile of two peaks, is a landmark rising visibly for the entire Bay Area. The City itself offers urban and suburban living, adjacent to striking natural environments and bucolic rural settings. BART public transportation also serves Walnut Creek, making it accessible quite easily to the rest of the East Bay and San Francisco without a car. We could go on and on, and you’d have to visit to believe us!

Walnut Creek provides comprehensive health care to approximately 350,000 members residing in the Diablo Service Area, with more than 130,000 of those members residing in Walnut Creek and surrounding areas. Many more travel from outside the service area for our Regionally funded and specialized Mental Health services. Our members span major ethnic groups (Latina/o, Multicultural, Asian, new or second-generation immigrants, LGBTQ and transgender related presenting problems or needs, and others who identify strongly with a cultural minority). Our patients range in age from 18 to 80, with greater representation among those who are 30 and older. Patients represent a range from high to low SES. Some of our members also speak Spanish, Russian, Farsi, and Mandarin/Cantonese languages.

Program Highlights

Member of the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC)

Many teams of multidisciplinary mental health specialists make up our department in Walnut Creek. Our providers maintain a very busy pace and provide services to members with a high level of acuity. You can hear their passion for the work and see their willingness to evaluate and modify approaches. This passion and productivity are palpable! In this setting, the staff who become internship supervisors truly feel a calling for teaching and training and consider it a special gift in their professional lives. When we gather for our monthly supervisory meetings, it is clearly a favorite activity and an opportunity to bring our “best selves” to the table.

Walnut Creek’s Mental Health and Addiction Medicine & Recovery Services (AMRS) provides Kaiser Permanente Northern California with the region’s highest level of care in several specialty areas of treatment, including addiction medicine, intensive outpatient psychiatry (post-hospitalization) and eating disorders intensive outpatient program. While the internship resides on the Adult AMRS Team, it provides supervised professional psychological services throughout our broader mental health department. With a rotation in the Eating Disorders Intensive Outpatient Program, WCRICP is unique in providing supervised clinical experience to interns in both general and specialized areas of current psychological practice.

We believe that interns who are flexible, curious, and comfortable with a fast pace are the best fit for our site. Trainees who can provide and receive constructive feedback are likely to benefit the most at WCRICP, as we are eager to provide the best experience for you. We have seen that interns who can be assertive about their needs and wishes seem to be the most gratified by our program design.

3 of the 4 most recent Chief Psychologists at Walnut Creek Mental Health and Addiction Medicine & Recovery Services have been former interns from our Mental Health Training Program Walnut Creek Internship Program.

Clinical Service Opportunities

• Group therapy and individual sessions
• Psychological Assessment
• Supervisory support and didactics
• Integrated team meetings
• Collaboration with wide array of multidisciplinary professionals
• Provide services to broadly representative population

Specialty Tracks

General psychology and psychiatry population, co-occurring disorders with additional training in Substance Use Disorders and specialty rotation in Eating Disorders, Intensive Outpatient Programming. Primarily work with all ages of adults and some experience with teens.

All rotations take place at Walnut Creek Department of Mental Health and Addiction Medicine & Recovery Services, and all interns complete all 4 rotations. There also are training opportunities at the Walnut Creek Hospital and Medical Offices.

Schedule

• Direct Patient Care: 3 – 5 hours weekly of individual patient care; 12 – 15 hours of group psychotherapy and group psychoeducation.
• Assessment: Adult ADHD or Neuropsychological Evaluation, 2 hours
• Individual Supervision: 2 hours
• Group Supervision weekly – Case Consultation: 1 hour & Professional Development: 1 hour
• Didactic Seminars: 2 hours weekly
• Multicultural Competency Seminar: 1.5 hours each month
• Multidisciplinary Team meetings: 2 hours
• Community Benefit Project: 3- 4 hours each month at local site
• Program Evaluation: 1 – 2 hours weekly for projects in Behavioral Medicine or other chosen setting
• 8 hour work days, Monday through Friday only
• No “on call” shifts or weekend hours

Didactic Training

Testimonials