Clinical Child and Adolescent PsychologyDoctoral Internship Program Overview

The UC Davis Medical Center, located in Sacramento, California, is an integrated, academic health system that is consistently ranked among the nation’s top medical schools. Within the UC Davis School of Medicine, the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences has strong collaborative relationships with Sacramento County’s Department of Health Services, UC Davis Health, the MIND Institute, and local school districts. Our doctoral internship program in clinical child and adolescent psychology offers interns the best of both worlds: training from a strong academic approach that emphasizes evidence-based treatment within the context of providing complex clinical work in outpatient, community mental health, primary care, and public school settings.

Alongside UC Davis Clinical Faculty, postdoctoral psychology fellows, as well as psychiatry residents and fellows, our psychology interns will receive their generalist child and adolescent training and provide direct psychological services at various clinical sites.

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Our internship program is dynamic and challenging. Successful applicants will have interest and experience in clinical child and adolescent psychology, with a strong foundation in conducting clinical intakes/interviewing, therapy, and assessment. In addition, successful applicants will have interest serving diverse children, adolescents, and families (e.g., age, ethnicity, race, culture, religion, immigration status, sexuality, gender identity, ability, etc.) as they will obtain experience working with Sacramento County Medi-Cal/EPSDT (0-21) and UC Davis Health child (ages 8-17) and family clients. Clients at the CAPS Clinic present with a wide range of complex diagnostic concerns. Many of these clients and their families struggle with multiple environmental stressors including low income, unemployment, poor social support, and/or family history of mental health or alcohol/substance abuse problems. Oftentimes, our CAPS clients and their family members have also experienced neglect or abuse and may be involved with Child Protective Services (CPS) and/or probation. Interns providing integrated behavioral health care at the Pediatric Clinic utilize brief CBT for children and adolescents presenting with mild-to-moderate symptoms of depression and anxiety.

By the end of the internship year, our interns will also develop comprehensive, evidence-based skills in intervention, assessment, screening/consultation, supervision, and teaching/training with a general child and adolescent population. Our program offers interns specialized training in various evidence-based therapeutic models, including but not limited to: CBT, TFCBT, FFT, and PCIT. There is an emphasis on trauma-informed care interventions and approaches, as well as strong commitment to advancing social justice across our clinical work. In addition, interns will receive training opportunities in both neurodevelopmental disorders and psychotic-spectrum disorders through our training collaborations with the UCD MIND Institute and the Sac EDAPT Early Psychosis Program, respectively.

As a training program, the UC Davis Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Doctoral Internship stands for diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice. We are committed to creating a welcoming training and teaching environment that respects individual differences while supporting the attainment of nationally recognized competencies for becoming a health service psychologist. To this end, we commit to: recognizing and addressing unconscious bias within our training organization, making efforts to recruit and retain diverse trainees and faculty from historically underrepresented groups in the field, engaging our team to create a more just and inclusive environment, developing the space for all team members to gather, share, and learn from one another, and to increase our awareness for inequality, power and privilege, discrimination, and various forms of oppression across clinical, professional, and personal settings to better engage in respectful and inclusive practices.

Learn more about justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in mental health