During the spring 2020 of my senior year, I began my internship at Therapeutic Intervention Services, INC. which is in Danville, VA. Therapeutic Intervention Services is a CARF- nationally accredited VA state licensed behavioral health agency serving various counties throughout Virginia– founded in 2011 and covered by an executive committee that represents a cross section of citizens from the area. This agency offers mental health services for adults and children to help them overcome life’s challenges. TIS provides service support for residents of Virginia who seek assistance with substance abuse and mental health issues.
What does Therapeutic Intervention Services do?
TIS delivers community-based treatment, support, and services for:
- People with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or chronic depression)
- Children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders
- People using/abusing alcohol and drugs
There are several departments at Therapeutic Intervention Services such as crisis stabilization, intensive in home, therapeutic day treatment, and mental health skill building that clients can obtain services suitable for their needs.
Therapeutic Intervention Services is committed to helping individuals achieve their goals. Their number one priority is to bring happiness and well-being within patients’ lives by restoring their mental balance. The goal is to help clients break free from old habits to develop healthy coping skills and find new ways to respond to life’s challenging situations. TIS’s social/legislative policies are:
- Open to serving all individuals of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds- regardless of one’s age and demographic
- Serve individuals who genuinely need help in order to sustain a healthy life
- Providing pro-bono services when individual(s) does not have insurance.
Roles as an intern at Therapeutic Intervention Services
- Filing of case notes, supervisions, medical forms, intake assessments, and authorization forms for children and adults
- Faxing of medical records and prescriptions
- Shadow and observe intake assessments and psychiatric evaluations to learn the working base for client needs.
- Teaching and conducting the therapeutic day treatment program for children
- Planning, prioritizing, and organizing ISP’s for individuals and children
- Working throughly with clients and their needs in a team structured setting.
- Communicating verbally when assisting clients over the phone, psychiatric evaluations, and intake assessments.
The course that I was taking along with my internship was HMSV 468. This course provides supervision for the human services intern in a seminar setting. 400 hours are devoted to a field placement, group seminar, on-air sessions, and individual supervision as 100 of those 400 hours are directly towards assisting clients. There were assignments and activities such as group discussions, process recordings, presentations, peer discussion of internship experiences, self assessment activities, and reports on professional meetings and topics. This course was equip in examining internship-related issues, address problems, and concerns relevant to internship, further enhance helping skills, and receive information and instruction pertinent to internship experience.
My course was held every Wednesday online from 9-11 a.m. Each week, we would discuss and reflect on work we did the previous week. We also would present our presentations; the case and site presentation.
During this presentation, students had to discuss a client whom have they been working with and ways in which they have been helping them. We would briefly reintroduce the agency serving the client while providing a brief social history on the particular client. Lastly, we reflected strengths and areas of improvement and greatest challenges and learning points.
This was our first presentation in which we included agency information and our role as an intern (duties, responsibilities etc.)
Overall, these experiences will relate to future goals or developing interpersonal skills by providing me ways in which I will meet the human needs of my clients while maintaining a commitment to improving the overall quality of life for human service populations. It allowed me to apply my academic preparation and practical skills in human service practice settings.