Thank you for your interest in predoctoral psychology internship training at the University of South Florida/Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute (FMHI) for the training year 2008-2009. The purpose of this website is to acquaint you with FMHI, the training philosophy of the Institute's internship, and the variety of training experiences offered to psychology interns.

FMHI is a research and training institute created by the Florida Legislature to better understand and improve Florida's and the nation's behavioral healthcare services. Institute faculty and staff identify gaps, inequities and other problems in the current service delivery system, and develop new knowledge, technologies, and processes designed to improve it.

APA-accredited since 1988, the FMHI internship is best defined as a training program in public sector service delivery. The program is unique among psychology internships. Its uniqueness emanates in part from the public sector focus and moreso from an emphasis on mental health policy research and empirically-based advocacy to augment training in traditional clinical skills. Interns at FMHI are trained to work with people who typically obtain behavioral healthcare in community agencies, non-profits, and government-supported programs. Mostly these are people of modest means. They often come from neighborhoods with a high rate of violence, families with low income, and communities of limited opportunity and diminished social capital. The fundamental premise underlying the training model is that to best serve people from these communities, clinicians must understand the larger structural and systemic factors involved in psychological dysfunction as well as clinical service delivery. Poverty, prejudice, privilege, institutional and interpersonal power inequities, educational and employment opportunities, ethnicity, crime, violence, police response, and the barriers to treatment posed by the stigma of mental illness are all factors emphasized in the training model.

Interns are trained in psychological evaluation and intervention methods meant for under- and poorly-served populations. However the social and economic factors mentioned above are often inextricably intertwined in their clients' psychological conditions. To be optimally effective in helping their clients and to facilitate the development of high level clinical skills, interns spend 80% of their time in the community, gaining experience in traditional clinical service delivery activities i.e., evaluation, psychological assessment, and psychotherapy. An assortment of ages, presenting complaints, life contexts, and psychotherapy intervention models are available. Settings include schools, hospitals, a prison, substance abuse treatment programs, family court, houses of worship, a nursing home, rural and urban community health centers, among others. These training opportunities are chosen not only for interns' clinical skill development, but also to expose interns to the large structural factors influencing mental and substance abuse disorders and affecting access to quality services. Optimally, through first-person experience interns obtain an existential appreciation of the common difficulties and frustrations often inherent in making broad, sustained changes in a person's quality of life when a variety of macro influences are working against those changes. However, interns move beyond these "micro" intervention strategies and learn about "macro" approaches as well, i.e., how to understand and change policies and laws that affect mental health and the behavioral healthcare service delivery system.

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The FMHI Internship is directed by Richard B. Weinberg, Ph.D., ABPP, and is fully accredited by the American Psychological Association. FMHI is a member of the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC) and abides by all of APPIC's regulations. FMHI participates in APPIC's Internship Matching Program, and will comply with all of APPIC's Match Policies, including the prohibition on soliciting, accepting, or using any ranking-related information from any intern applicant. The entire APPIC Match Policy can be found at http://www.appic.org. USF and FMHI are Affirmative Action/Equal Access/Equal Opportunity Institutions. Fingerprinting is required of all Institute employees (including interns). In addition several of the placement agencies used for internship training (specifics noted below) require pre-employment drug screens.

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Last updated: September 17, 2008