Behavioral Health Internships

Our pediatric behavioral health team works in school-based health centers across our valley serving youth and families. Internship placements are available in elementary, middle, and high schools where La Clinica operates health centers. Interns will have the opportunity to work with youth, families, medical providers, and school systems. You’ll learn how to partner with schools to help youth succeed, and you’ll gain direct experience in providing ongoing mental health therapy to kids.

As an intern, you’ll provide assessment, treatment planning, and ongoing individual and family or group therapy for a small caseload of youth. You’ll have opportunities to consult with a child and adolescent psychiatrist in delivering care to the youth you serve. If you are placed at an elementary school health center, you’ll be able to partner with skills trainers in supporting kids. You’ll also integrate with the medical team at your assigned health center, learning ways to quickly engage youth in medical care when needed. Finally, you’ll have access to a wide range of learning opportunities throughout the year, including equity, diversity, and inclusion workshops, specific therapeutic modality trainings, and assessment and intervention training from our integrated psychiatric team.

In this placement, interns will have the opportunity to learn and practice these skills:

• Assessment and diagnosis
• Treatment planning
• Individual and family therapy
• Groups (therapeutic or skills based)
• Crisis assessment and safety planning
• Care coordination
• Discharge planning

La Clinica’s integrated behavioral health team includes psychiatric providers, behavioral health clinicians, and behavioral health support specialists embedded in our primary care clinics, a dental clinic, our Women’s Health Center, and our Mobile Health Center. As an intern in primary care behavioral health, you’ll be part of the primary care team providing a population-based approach to behavioral health care. This means you’ll serve people of all ages for a range of needs related to health concerns, mental health and substance use challenges, grief, and more.

As an intern, you’ll integrate with the care team at your assigned clinic. You will support the team by being available to connect directly with patients on the same day they are there to see their primary care provider and a behavioral health need is identified. The provider or care team member will bring you into the visit to work with the patient on immediate needs, then you’ll schedule follow up visits as needed to provide ongoing support.

In this placement, interns will have the opportunity to learn and practice these skills:

• Contextual interviewing and functional analysis of behaviors
• Targeted interventions and education
• Goal and experiment setting
• Primary care team consultation support
• Focused acceptance and commitment therapy
• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills

You’ll have a chance to practice new skills and receive real time feedback through in-clinic shadowing opportunities. You’ll also have a chance to grow your skills in a diagnostic rotation with our integrated psychiatric services team. Finally, you can participate in a variety of trainings on equity, diversity and inclusion topics, as well as specific therapeutic modalities.

WinterSpring creates a safe and confidential environment for sharing, learning, and healing to find a way through grief.

Our team offers compassionate phone support, assessment, group grief support, resources, and referrals using the companioning model of grief support developed by Dr. Alan Wolfelt. WinterSpring also offers grief education for organizations and individuals interested in creating understanding about and support for grief.

As an intern, you will receive training in providing grief support through group services. You will learn skills in how to engage and connect with grievers, assess their readiness to participate in group work, and offer resources and connection to care. This opportunity is suitable for counseling students looking to complete a practicum or for social work students seeking a generalist placement for their first-year internship.