Category: Mental Health

A guest post by Nick Sabato about the internship he completed in Spring 2019 as part of PSY 300.

In Spring of 2019 I completed my internship with the Sweetser organization, which is part of Maine Mental Health Services. My internship experience involved working with young children, age 7-12, who come from many different backgrounds, for many different reasons. A typical day of work for me includes helping the children eat their dinners and keep their composure during movie nights, tucking them into bed, and reading bedtime stories. However, there are times where it can be hectic; then I use de-escalation tactics including explaining to the kids to focus on themselves, take deep breaths, and take space. I also take part in meetings between staff, clinical psychologists, and the families of our clients in order to help achieve a suitable treatment plan. I feel as though I am making a positive impact on the lives of the children that I work with. It is also incredibly rewarding to see a child’s face light up when he or she sees me walk onto the unit. There are two children that I work with that want me to play games with them, tuck them into bed, and read their bedtimes stories to. The fact that these two children choose me to spend time with provides me with the knowledge that I am doing my part correctly.

This internship experience has lead me to hone my interpersonal social skills and has sharpened my abilities in regards to using de-escalation tactics for those in a crisis situation. In the future, I plan to go into researching psychotic disorders such as Schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder, Schizoaffective disorder, Paraphrenia, and more. The ability to work with clients this young and with the wide range of symptoms that are present will allow me to always keep in mind that the same disorder can manifest itself differently in different people. Interning at Sweetser has also taught me that I do have the capability and competency to work with children in the mental health field. However I plan to focus on working with and researching adult psychotic disorders because my personal attributes are more suitable for this population and that is my passion. My internship experience has given me prodigious amounts of clarity in respect to my professional career because now I know that working with adults who are burdened with psychotic disorders is my vocation.

My internship experience reinforces many different concepts that I have learned over my last 4 years of learning. The most relevant concept that ties into my internship is that having a stable environment is important for a young child. Another concept that can be applied to some of our residents is Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby’s theory of attachment styles. At our facility, the children we work with all appear to be either in the anxious resistant or anxious avoidant classification (Bowlby & Ainsworth, 1991). Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory states that behavior can be learned through observation and modeling, shown by his Bobo doll experiment which examined aggression (Bandura, 1971). Many of the children I work with exhibit their parents behaviors, such as aggression, recklessness, profanity, and many more behaviors. The ability to recognize the real life displays of these theories in lived experience is paramount in the learning process and has provided me with an increased level of appreciation for the residential spectrum of the mental health field and working with children.

Our thanks to Nick for sharing his thoughts about his internship. All psychology majors complete an internship as part of PSY 300 and work closely with a faculty member who helps them with their placement.

Learn more about the Psychology major at: https://www.une.edu/cas/psych/psychology and the Mental Health minor at: https://www.une.edu/cas/psych/psychology/programs/mhrtc-certification

A guest post by Zane Getman about his experience as part of PSY 300 Internship

My internship at Sweetser during Spring 2019 was both rewarding and challenging. Sweetser is a prominent behavioral healthcare organization with several residential locations throughout Maine. While there are resources provided to adults in need of Sweetser’s services, Sweetser mostly provides assistance to children, adolescents, and their families. Recipients of Sweetser’s care services are often adolescents suffering from trauma, depression, ADHD, and behavioral/cognitive issues.

As an intern I was essentially a Youth and Family Counselor in training at one of their sites in Saco. I worked in the Portland Adolescent Unit (PAU) which included eight adolescent boys. Sweetser creates individualized programs based on the clients’ strengths and tendencies in order to help them overcome certain behaviors that prevent them from thriving in a public setting. In my unit, the clients shared difficulty with self-restraint, sexualized behaviors, and oppositional defiance to any type of authority. My role at Sweetser was to build connections with each client to identify their strengths and weaknesses to help them overcome these behavioral issues, as well as to work with my fellow staff members to provide empathic and effective care.

There are many valuable things that I learned throughout this internship, but the most significant one to me has been the importance of establishing connections. The adolescent boys that I spent 120 hours with all required different types of attention, and it is impossible to meaningfully help them make progress if you are unable to build a trusting relationship with them individually. At first whenever I would try to intervene if a client was having a rough week or try to offer them advice, they were not receptive to it at all. However, as I became more present in the unit and the clients, and I got to know each other more, we began to respect one another and I became popular among them as a staff member that they would gravitate to. Many times I would simply listen to their issues stemming from their families, homes, school, and peers, but many of the adolescents in my unit do not open up to adults often.

With this in mind I was able to recognize the position I found myself in as a youth and family counselor, and they began to view whatever words I had to offer with value. Another aspect of my internship that I valued is empathy. Understanding that many of these children are spending their childhoods in these cottages (one client in my unit has been at Sweetser for 7 years, and will be until he is discharged at age 18), away from their families, should be taken into consideration deciding to work there. However tough I may think my schedule is during the week, I tried my best to leave it all at the door when I would walk into my unit and begin working with kids that had been living there for years without an idea of when they will finish their program and return home.

This internship has also influenced my potential future career path by introducing me to people involved in various different fieldwork positions based in psychology. I mostly worked alongside other Youth and Family Counselors in my unit and I learned that they are some of the most important people at residential sites like Sweetser because they are the ones that the clients spend a majority of their time with. I was also introduced to the first licensed clinician I have ever met; Jess is the LC assigned to the Portland Adolescent Unit and she is amazing at what she does. She included me in individual meetings with the clients where we discussed their progress in school and managing their behavioral tendencies. In some of these meetings the clients’ families would be present, and I was allowed to sit in with them and listen to their thoughts as well. During my internship I also met with various behavioral therapists, sometimes walking individual clients from my unit to their offices for their weekly meetings to discuss how their medication routines were going.

Another aspect of fieldwork in psychology that I have been exposed to throughout my internship is the position of a caseworker. I was present during an admissions meeting for a new client, and this meeting consisted of myself, my unit’s licensed clinician, the new client, his family, and also his caseworker. She represented him in this meeting similarly to how a lawyer represents a client in court; she was knowledgeable of his weaknesses and approved of Sweetser’s program that was intended to improve his behaviors. Having met people in all of these mentioned positions and seeing how they do their job in the field of psychology has been helpful in showing me a variety of potential future career options that I will consider as I continue my studies.            

Working in a unit where the primary focus is rehabilitating adolescent’s overly sexualized behaviors, I have seen issue firsthand that I learned about at UNE. Most of these concepts are recalled from my sophomore year when I enrolled in Abnormal Psychology, which include paraphilia, oppositional defiance disorder, sociopathic behaviors, trauma/abuse, and just overall lack of respect for the boundaries of others. All of the boys in PAU have violated others’ boundaries in some form and are prone to respond defiantly or violently to authority, which relates to what I learned about oppositional defiance disorder being common in many young boys. Some have experienced or witnessed abuse in their family backgrounds, which can explain why they believe their behaviors are justified when done to others since it was what they were exposed to during very crucial developmental stages of their early lives. In Abnormal Psychology we thoroughly studied paraphilia, another concept that I have noticed is a common theme in many of my unit’s clients’ backgrounds as well. Overall, working at Sweetser and with these children was an eye-opening experience in how it introduced me to the field of psychology in the real world, as well as brought many concepts that I had studied over the years at UNE to life before me.

Our thanks to Zane for sharing his thoughts about his internship experience. All psychology majors complete at least one internship, PSY 300, as part of their degree. In this class they work directly with a faculty supervisor who helps them make connections between their work on site and the concepts they are learning about in their coursework.