The Community Psychological Service (CPS) is a not-for-profit outpatient mental health clinic established at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 1977. CPS is the primary practicum training site for graduate students in the APA-approved Doctoral Training Program in Clinical Psychology at UM-St. Louis. The threefold mission of CPS is to offer its graduate students, pre-doctoral interns and post-doctoral fellows opportunities for clinical training, professional service provision and applied research.
Located in North St. Louis County, CPS serves Metropolitan St. Louis and its surrounding areas. CPS clinicians provide affordable psychological services on a sliding-scale fee basis for clients from diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Lower income individuals without health insurance make up the bulk of CPS referrals.
CPS clinicians perform psychological assessments for private clients and provide evaluations for local schools and state agencies on a contractual basis. These include the Special School District of St. Louis County, the State of Missouri on behalf of clients of the Missouri Department of Social Services Children's Division and the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, The Missouri Board of Probation and Parole, a group home, a mental health center, and a local charter school also refer clients for evaluation.
Interns choosing CPS as a major rotation will have the opportunity to refine their diagnostic skills and enhance competencies in interviewing and tests administration and interpretation by way of conducting a wide variety of assessments. Opportunities for cognitive and personality (objective and projective) assessment are available. Comprehensive personality evaluations of adults and children with severe emotional disturbances, forensic parenting competency assessments, violence/risk assessments, and evaluations of learning and attentional disorders in children and adults are common. Opportunities to conduct school-based evaluations, adolescent sex offender evaluations as well as Probation/Parole and Vocational Rehabilitation evaluations also may be available. Although this is primarily an assessment rotation, there may also be some opportunities for interns to provide outpatient therapy services to CPS clients. In addition, interns may have the opportunity to provide clinical supervision for a graduate student.
Interns will receive 1 to 2 hours of individual supervision each week. However, numerous opportunities are present for more informal supervision experiences. Interns on this rotation will also be given opportunities to participate in didactic training experiences at UM-St. Louis including the colloquia series offered by the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program , the Center for Trauma Recovery and Children's Advocacy Services of Greater St. Louis.
