By: Marin Kautz

For many psychology graduate students, the real-world implications of our work can get lost in the fog of long hours in the lab. Particularly for clinical psychology graduate students, the divide between the populations we aim to serve and our training as clinicians and scientists can feel wide. For example, clinical students often find themselves studying specific mechanisms which may or may not be active or relevant to the issues their clients are presenting with.

There has been a recent push within Temple University and beyond to shape clinical psychology training programs around a clinician-scientist model which aims to increase the use of scientific methods to improve strategies in clinical settings. While this model may increase collaboration between researchers and clinicians within an academic setting, we must bridge the gap between academic psychology training programs and the needs of the wider mental health community. The integration of these real-world needs with mechanistic and therapeutic research can be achieved through both exposure to and direct collaboration with those serving the mental health needs of the community.

For approximately two years, current Temple University clinical psychology PhD graduate students have been working to serve a wider population and gain exposure to the mental health needs of our community by providing a monthly skills-based group for youth housed in the Youth Emergency Services (YES) shelter. The YES shelter is a short-term adolescent homeless shelter located in the Fairmount neighborhood of North Philadelphia.

According to one of the graduate student leaders of the YES Group, Jordan Davis, these graduate student clinicians aim to provide homeless adolescents with important skills to help manage the difficult emotions they may be experiencing. These modular groups focus on basic psychoeducation about mental health, self-regulation and interpersonal skills. Ms. Davis feels that participating in the YES Group is rewarding for graduate students because it provides students with an opportunity 1) to work with underrepresented youth, 2) to disseminate important and useful information about mental health to youth and 3) to gain initial experience with doing psychoeducational work in a group setting. Additionally, Ms. Davis feels that conducting outreach of any kind also provides students with an opportunity to provide useful services for populations that we may not otherwise interact with as a part of our standard clinical training.

Beyond gaining awareness, integrating scientific strategies with the current needs of the mental health community can be accomplished through direct collaboration between academic researchers and current community providers. An excellent example of this is Hannah Frank's NIMH-funded F31 dissertation study in the clinical psychology PhD program at Temple. Her study examines whether exposing community mental health clinicians themselves to simulated exposure therapy or to standard training approaches are more effective at changing the clinicians' attitudes and behaviors related to exposure therapy for anxiety.

Ms. Frank chose to focus her dissertation research on training community mental health clinicians because she feels it is important to expand access to evidence-based treatments to settings where they otherwise may not be available. Research indicates that it takes up to 17 years for evidence-based treatments to be adopted into community settings (Balas & Boren, 2000), suggesting that the work that we do within the academic setting is often slow to be disseminated to the populations for whom it is intended. To address this issue, Ms. Frank formed a community advisory board of relevant stakeholders (i.e., therapists in community mental health settings) to inform decisions related to her study design and approach. Ms. Frank stated that this input "has been invaluable, as they have expertise on community mental health settings, and they often raise issues that I would never have anticipated as an outsider."

By directly collaborating with community members across all phases of research, we can design our academic work to anticipate the challenges of the translation from research to practice.