The Wright Institute Clinic Overview

Since 1969, The Wright Institute Clinic has provided training in depth-oriented psychotherapy for students of The Wright Institute, while providing sliding scale psychotherapy services to the Bay Area Community and beyond.

The Wright Institute Clinic meets the graduate program criteria for a practicum facility. The 12-month training year begins at the start of the Fall term and ends in the Fall term of the following year.

The time commitment is approximately 15-18 hours per week, including your clinical caseload, intake interviewing, integrated assessments, individual and group supervision, didactic, and administrative paperwork.

Additional time may be spent with our affiliate programs - Youth Radio, and The North Berkeley Senior Center.

As a trainee at the Clinic you will be clinically and administratively supported by a personal mentor and Medi-Cal advisor in additional to your individual supervisor and Clinic Conference Leader.

The Clinic is staffed by advanced students who fulfill the role of mentor/advisor and every trainee receives individual support around issues of clinical and professional development. Additionally, the Clinic is staffed by a psychologist who provides training and individual support related to billing Medi-Cal.

Clinical Training

Individual and Clinic Conference supervisors broadly use a contemporary psychodynamic or psychoanalytically informed approach, while integrating other important ideas such as the socio-cultural context, issues of social justice and marginalization.

The practicum training is designed to help beginning clinicians learn the fundamentals of clinical practice and begin to develop some of the basic skills and knowledge required for the competent provision of psychodynamic psychotherapy in a community clinic setting.

The training focuses on the use-of-self in the therapeutic process. Priority is given to the spontaneous needs of the therapeutic pair (trainee and patient), and therefore, learning the basic process of psychodynamic psychotherapy happens in vivo. Rather than stipulate what topics will be covered, the weekly conference is geared toward the difficulties that the trainees are struggling with as they encounter the patient and themselves in the therapeutic endeavor.

With flexibility in treatment approach, the clinic is able to address a variety of patient needs from relationship struggles, depression, anxiety, trauma, obstacles in personality, developmental and life transitions, and a range of other mental health challenges.

Students receive weekly individual supervision by our adjunct clinical faculty. The Wright Institute Clinic supervisors represent the wealth of clinical experience offered in the Bay Area. All of our supervisors have successful private practices and many are involved in other professional activities.

The weekly Clinic Conference uses a small group approach in discussing clinical case material, dynamic formulation, and treatment technique.

Integrated Assessments

As part of a clinical assessment/intake interview, every trainee will administer a mini-battery of psychological measures and integrate them with information received from an in-depth clinical interview to write an integrated assessment/report. Trainees receive training and support in learning the foundational skill of integrated assessment report writing from a psychodynamic perspective. These integrated assessments can be counted toward assessment hours on internship applications.

Intentional Integration of Cultural and Social Justice Ideas with Psychoanalytic Theory

The Wright Institute Clinic Didactic Series focuses on an intentional bridging of the gap between psychoanalytic theory and other cultural, feminist, and social justice ideas. We focus on helping students understand that contemporary psychoanalytic theory is actually very spacious and friendly toward the social justice mission and values that we all hold so dear.

Youth Radio

The Wright Institute Clinic has a partnership with Youth Radio in Downtown Oakland (Broadway Avenue) to provide therapy and psychological services to support youth who are in their training program who are interested in mental health services. Since 1992 YR has served thousands of teens from under-resourced public schools, community based organizations, group homes, and juvenile detention centers by providing free, after school training programs in broadcast journalism, radio production, and media advocacy. They especially aim to serve low income youth, youth of color, and girls.

North Berkeley Senior Center

The Wright Institute Clinic has a partnership with the North Berkeley Senior Center to provide individual and group therapy to older adults who are interested in talking to a therapist. If interested, clinic therapists have the opportunity to work with older adults and to learn the specialized treatment needed for this stage of development. Therapy is done in both individual and group modalities.

Clinic Director:
Diane Kaplan, Ph.D. dkaplan@wi.edu

Assistant Director:
Robert Deady, Psy.D. rdeady@wi.edu

Director of Clinical Services
Deanna van Ligten, Psy.D. dvanligten@wi.edu