Counseling and Psychological Services
Direct Service Activities
Clinical Service
Each intern carries 12 individual cases and one therapy group per week, with case management and system linkage, client advocacy, and clinical documentation as required. Interns spend one day per week (Thursday) at the Chicago CAPS office at Northwestern University’s Chicago Campus which serves graduate and professional programs, including law school, medical school, and graduate programs in health and biological sciences. Clients at the Evanston CAPS constitute about three-quarters of an intern’s caseload, and they are both undergraduate and graduate students. The other quarter of an intern’s caseload are graduate or professional students from the Chicago Campus, thereby enhancing the diversity in developmental stages among interns’ clients.
At the Evanston CAPS, each intern serves as a crisis counselor for 4 hours (1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.) one afternoon per week. Each intern is also responsible for three hours per week of intake availability, one of which is urgent intake during the period of 4 hours per week as a triage/crisis counselor. Interns rotate with staff to provide after-hours on-call crisis coverage; on average, interns are responsible for covering one week of after-hours on-call per quarter. Case management related to intake, urgent, and crisis contacts will vary over the year, but will average 2 to 3 cases per week.
Supervision and Training
Interns develop skills as trainers by providing individual clinical supervision to externs for the academic year. They may also be engaged in other training activities such as seminar presentations, paraprofessional skill training, etc.
Developmental Programming and Outreach
Interns co-facilitate semi-structured to structured workshops for two quarters; workshops are usually a series of 3 or 4 sequenced weekly sessions which last 1 to 1 ½ hours each. A one-quarter Media Interventions rotation will involve the designing of informational material on mental health issues targeted for dissemination to the broader campus community. Interns also serve as liaison to assigned academic departments and residence halls to provide consultative services and programming as requested. Outreach programs may vary in topic and format, and might include residence hall “firesides” on developmental or mental health issues (e.g. eating disorders, stress management), paraprofessional skill training sessions, debriefing sessions for critical events, or presentations about CAPS services. Interns conduct on average two psychoeducational or outreach programs per quarter for campus groups.
