Predoctoral Internship
Payne Whitney Manhattan at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center offers a one-year predoctoral internship program accredited by the American Psychological Association and directed by Susan Evans, PhD. This highly selective program recruits psychology graduate students for four internship positions. The training program is designed to provide clinical experience in the evaluation and treatment of patients with a wide range of mental health concerns and illness. The program includes a research placement program that protects 4 6 hours of time for mentored research. The patient population includes individuals representing different developmental stages in the life cycle and all major forms of psychopathology. A wide spectrum of diagnostic and therapeutic techniques is covered. All phases of the internship are closely supervised and evaluated. Trainees typically have four to five hours of supervision per week that examine all phases of evaluation, management, and treatment. Supervision is provided by psychology and psychiatry full-time and voluntary faculty. A program of clinical and didactic seminars accompanies each clinical experience. Most teaching is done individually or in small groups.
A central goal of the internship is to create confident, competent independent practitioners who are skilled in a variety of treatment modalities and treatment settings. Interns conduct both long and short-term therapy in the Weill Cornell Cognitive Therapy Clinic (CTC) with adults experiencing a range of symptoms and life problems. The CTC provides intensive training in cognitive therapy, with several of the supervising faculty certified cognitive therapists from the Beck Institute of Cognitive Therapy. Interns also participate in the Personality Disorders Institute, the focus of which is the treatment of individuals with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. Finally, each intern receives training in psychodynamic psychotherapy.
In addition to these outpatient therapy experiences, interns participate in the following hospital services: the Psychiatric Emergency Room, Evaluation Service, and Psychological Assessment. These services provide the intern with the opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary fashion with psychiatrists, social workers and nurses and to develop skills in diagnosis, rapid assessment, triage, consultation liaison and crisis interventions. Psychological assessment involves inpatient and outpatient psychological testing with particular emphasis on basic neuropsychological assessment. This aspect of the program is complemented by weekly didactic seminars during the year, which provide the theoretical basis of psychological and neuropsychological assessment and relevant case examples. Interns conduct psychological assessment on an approximately case per month basis.
Interns may elect to spend 4 or 8 month rotations for in-depth specialized training in any of the following specialties:
- Consultation Liaison (John Barnhill, MD and Steven Ferrando, MD)
- HIV/AIDS (Joe Murray, MD)
- Functional Neuroimaging (David Silbersweig, MD and Emily Stern, MD)
- Sackler Institute (BJ Casy, PhD)
- Womens Health (Catherine Birndorf, MD)
- Anxiety and Traumatic Stress (JoAnn Difede, PhD)
- Geropsychiatry (JoAnn Sirey, PhD)
- Adolescent Inpatient (Rebecca Rendleman, MD)
- Neuropsychology (Marianne Findler, PhD and Lisa Ravdin, PhD)
- Personality Disorders Institute (John Clarkin, PhD)
- Adolescent child Outpatient (Barbara Flye, PhD)
- Eating Disorders (Gladys Frankel, PhD and Melissa Klein, PhD)
- Schizophrenia (Yulia Landa, PhD)
- Womens Inpatient CBT Approach (Rebecca Hand, PhD and Kathleen McCarty, MD)
- Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (Steven Passik, PhD)
Interns with special interest in borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, geropsychology, child psychiatry, or womens CBT approach may elect to include clinical and/or research activity in one of these programs at Payne Whitney Westchester to complement the training at Payne Whitney Manhattan.
