MercyHealth Behavioral Health Institute
The Behavioral Health Institute at MercyHealth: Clermont seeks to provide mental health services for a broad range of patients and mental health dilemmas. As a student intern, I was given an inside view of how various mental healthcare professionals work together to ensure dynamic, multi-faceted patient care. The beginning of the internship is essentially a shadowing experience. I followed around the psychiatrist I had been paired with to see all of his patients on the floor, reviewed patient notes before and after patient encounters, attended treatment team meetings, sat in on psychotherapy groups, and interacted with nursing staff. Following this, we began working on what would become my main project for the internship: developing interviewing skills and eventually conducting patient interviews on my own. I also helped to provide feedback about the internship experience and structure it for future interns.
Professional Skills
While the skills this internship seeks to foster are very specific toward a career in mental healthcare, the most prominent among them, respecting everyone, is a universal professional skill. It's not something that I feel everyone realizes is an important professional skill. When I say respecting everyone, I'm not referring to deferring to a superior or being respectful just for the sake of networking. In this case, what I'm talking about is respecting everyone for the fact that they are human. Some of the patients I interacted with were clearly suffering and reaching out for any form of compassion and understanding. In some cases, their families have retreated from them or they were homeless. In interacting with these patients, I learned to see them for their common humanity, and not what made them different. I learned to see them for the person, and not for the disease. This skill is crucial for all medical professionals, and certainly worthy of developing for all other professionals as well. It helps to foster a sense of community and support that promotes well-being across fields.
While the skills this internship seeks to foster are very specific toward a career in mental healthcare, the most prominent among them, respecting everyone, is a universal professional skill. It's not something that I feel everyone realizes is an important professional skill. When I say respecting everyone, I'm not referring to deferring to a superior or being respectful just for the sake of networking. In this case, what I'm talking about is respecting everyone for the fact that they are human. Some of the patients I interacted with were clearly suffering and reaching out for any form of compassion and understanding. In some cases, their families have retreated from them or they were homeless. In interacting with these patients, I learned to see them for their common humanity, and not what made them different. I learned to see them for the person, and not for the disease. This skill is crucial for all medical professionals, and certainly worthy of developing for all other professionals as well. It helps to foster a sense of community and support that promotes well-being across fields.
Applications from Major
As a neuropsychology major interested in pursuing a career in psychiatry, this internship was right up my alley. There are quite literally dozens of components of my major studies that I was able to apply during the internship. One of the most relevant also involved the local community. Early on in the semester, there was a sharp increase in the number of treated opiate overdose cases. Many of the patients we see use illicit drugs of some kind, including heroin. This coincided almost perfectly with a lecture in my Brains on Drugs course on opiate use and abuse. Having studied the effects of heroin in other classes, and gone more in depth during this particular lecture, I was well-prepared to interact with some of our patients who were admitted heroin users. I was able to talk to them about their dependency on heroin and the lengths they went to in order to obtain heroin. It allowed me to take a purely academic discussion and see how it operated in the real world, listening to patients describe their own experiences and helping them to understand why they experienced heroin the way they did.