🚀 go-pugleaf

My understanding is that it isn't so much a question of whether or not to
continue with requiring a clinical internship (as I'm interpreting some of
the postings to suggest- but then maybe I'm misreading them!), but a
question of whether or not schools should switch to granting clinical
students the Ph.D. when they finish the coursework and the dissertation,
as occurs in many other areas of psych that don't require a predoc
internship (i.e., social, cognitive, etc...).  I'm pretty sure that before
an APA approved program can grant a degree in "Clinical psychology" a
predoctoral internship has to be completed.  Although some programs
currently grant a Ph.D. to clinical students without the internship, it
just can't be called a degree in "clinical." That's the case here at UIC
where clinical students can defend the dissertation and get a Ph.D. in
"psychology", not "clinical psychology" but as far as I know, nobody ever
takes that option.  We also need to have at least proposed the
dissertation and there's now a lot of encouragement to defend before
going, and it sounds like that's also the case in other schools.  So if
students will essentially have completed the doctorate before going on
internship, I figure it would be nice to be officially granted the Ph.D.
That has the added bonus of putting  psychology interns and psychiatry
residents on equal footing in the clinical setting-- both get to call
themself "Dr."

I think another one of the arguments for switching to a post-doctoral
internship is that it is currently difficult for training sites to get
paid by insurance companies for work done by non-Ph.D. level clinicians,
so having post-doc interns might avoid around this problem.  Although that
still doesn't take care of the issue of licensed vs. non-licensed (so
maybe the insurance companies wouldn't pay after all?!)  If that were to
result in more sites being willing to sponsor internships, that would
probably be a good thing- it would help with the internship supply and
demand problem!

-Lindsey

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Lindsey Turner, M.A.
Prevention Research Center
Department of Psychology
University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, IL  60607