The Internship, Practicum, and Field Placement Handbook: A Guide for the Helping Professions

A unique core text/reference for Internships, Practicums, and Field Placements in Psychology, Social Work, Counseling, and related helping disciplines. Acknowledging, anticipating, and addressing the everyday questions, anxieties, fears, and concerns of interns, this practical handbook bridges the gap between academic coursework and the knowledge, skills, and emotional challenges that are found in the “real world” of the helping professions.

Organized both chronologically and topically, the text begins with practical suggestions for how one finds an internship and concludes with how one terminates cases and looks ahead to career options. Along the way students learn about ethics, diversity, supervision, clinical writing, liability issues, dangerousness, stress, self-care and other essential — but often overlooked — topics.

It draws upon the latest research and information from psychology, psychiatry, social work, counseling, and other helping professions — as well as extensive personal experience — and includes exercises for self-exploration and discussion along with easily-removed forms for evaluations, critical information, ethics and other essential tasks

• Uses a friendly and accessible writing style throughout.
• Organizes content along both chronological and thematic lines.
• Chapters are organized sequentially to anticipate the stages interns pass through — from selecting placements to finishing the internship — and the understandings or skills that will be required in those stages.
• Emphasizes practical knowledge based both on “real world” experience and the latest literature and research in the field.
• Addresses in depth topics critical to interns, instructors, and supervisors.
• Offers personal experiences designed to help interns realize that everyone makes mistakes, especially those struggling to apply classroom learning to the real world.
• Contains extensive discussion of ethics and liability issues pertaining to practitioners and students.li>Discusses issues and approaches to supervision and gives practical suggestions for making the most of the supervisory experience.
• Exercises and examples help students distinguish between strong and weak writing and better understand what is needed for clinical writing.
• Summarizes many of the major theories and concepts concerning diversity and applies them to the context of the students' experiences at their internship site.
• Helps students prepare for the emotions and other stresses of field work — a very important, but often overlooked, topic. Two full chapters discuss the stresses students encounter in the field and offer suggestions and exercises for promoting self awareness effective coping strategies.
• Openly discusses many “taboo” subjects in graduate programs — including boundary problems between interns and superiors, as well as issues related to the economics of the profession and the guilt many new professionals feel in charging a fee for their services.
• And much more!

Disc. ethical/legal issues, record keeping, super- vision, diversity issues, stress, dangerous clients, etc.