Brian Rieger, Ph.D.

Track Coordinator

Integrated behavioral healthcare is a rapidly growing and evolving field in which psychologists and other behavioral healthcare providers are deployed directly into primary care medical clinics. Integrated care has the aims of:

1. increased access to mental health treatment, particularly for historically underserved or marginalized populations,
2. earlier identification and treatment of mental and behavioral health problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and adherence to medical treatment recommendations).
3. Interprofessional growth: When psychologists and medical providers work side by side, their increased communication and collaboration results in more psychologically-minded medical professionals, more medically informed psychologists, and better medical and psychiatric outcomes for patients.

For these reasons, we are excited to be able to offer a new track in our Doctoral Internship in Clinical Psychology, focusing on Integrated Adult Behavioral Health Care. There are currently two internship positions offered in this track.

The Integrated Care Track is primarily situated in Upstate’s new, state-of-the-art, Nappi Wellness Institute. Here, interns will provide consultation and brief treatment to primary care patients, as well as more formal short-to-medium-term psychotherapy in the Nappi mental health clinic. In addition to this outpatient work, interns will have opportunities to rotate through various inpatient and outpatient settings and will receive formal and informal didactic training specific to this area.

This track will also be part of the larger adult internship cohort and will attend the Theory and Case Formulation, Ethics, Professional Development,Midnfulness, and Supervision seminars attended by other interns. Some of these seminars are highly informed by  “human science” approaches to psychology, integrating existential, phenomenological, ethical, and psychoanalytic theory and practice. Thus the intern will be working at the intersection of humanities-based theory and cutting-edge, scientifically-informed intervention.

Please contact Dr. Miller or Dr. Brian Rieger, Integrated Care Track Coordinator, for more information.