South Central Mental Health Counseling Center

South Central Mental Health Counseling Center (SCMHCC, Inc.) is a community-based outpatient mental health agency that serves children and adults with a full range of diagnoses. The Counseling Center has been providing services to local residents of Butler County since 1962. Each of three offices is strategically located throughout the county to facilitate client access to services provided in El Dorado, Augusta, and Andover. All three Counseling Centers are within a twenty-five mile drive from Wichita. South Central Mental Health Counseling Center, Inc. is licensed by the Department of Aging.

The SCMHCC, Inc. internship site provides generalist training with an emphasis on individual and family needs. Prevention, assessment, and treatment techniques are conducted with an emphasis on empirically-based methods. Interns gain experience with a variety of prevention, assessment, and intervention techniques appropriate to specific populations and settings, including individual, group, and family approaches.

Mentoring relationships with primary supervisors are a key component of training with additional instruction and supervision provided by interaction with other psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and mental health support staff. Interns will assume increasingly independent professional and clinical roles as the training year progresses.

Services provided include the full range of individual and group therapy, marriage and family therapy, substance abuse treatment, employee assistance programs, crisis resolution, hospitalization facilitation, psychological evaluations, consultation with medical staff, and community support programs for individuals with severe and persistent mental illness and severely emotionally disturbed designated children. Consumers of mental health services in rural areas such as South Central's often provide a unique challenge to service providers who may face multi-generational patterns of untreated illness and limited resources.

Our Augusta office, where both of our interns are placed

Intern Training Opportunities

Therapy and Consultation

Interns will be located at one of two different locations – Andover and Augusta. Interns will gain clinical experience working with clients with a variety of presenting symptoms and issues, a wide age range, and a diverse socioeconomic background. Training will be provided in individual, group, and family therapy, as well as in consultation with psychiatrists, teachers, attorneys, judges, case managers, child protective services staff, and other professionals. Interns will learn to develop comprehensive treatment plans that are objective and measurable, and serve as the Treatment Coordinator for those clients receiving multiple services. In this capacity interns will lead case conferences with case management staff to coordinate care for adults and children.

Group Therapy

Group therapy is an integral part of the outpatient services provided at SCMHCC, Inc. There will be opportunities to participate as a co-facilitator of pre-existing groups as well as developing a group therapy curriculum and starting a group in the intern's own area of interest.

Some of the groups currently or previously offered at SCMHCC, Inc. include:

Anger management
Parenting skills
CBT
Trauma survival (children and adults)
Mindfulness

Assessment

Interns will spend two half days per week conducting assessments and writing up the resulting reports. Interns will have opportunities to conduct psychological evaluations of children, adolescents, and adults. Interns will be provided training in a wide variety of evaluations and assessment instruments, integration of multiple sources of data, and writing reports that are tailored to the referral question, nature of the evaluation, and specific referral source.

Assessment referrals routinely request evaluations to address differential diagnosis, treatment planning, personality and intellectual/cognitive functioning and academic achievement. Evaluations often focus on severe and persistent mental illnesses, personality disorders, learning disabilities, ADHD, developmental disabilities, and emotional and behavioral disorders. Opportunities may be available for observing weight loss evaluations, parental capacity evaluations, and competency evaluations.

An extensive inventory of assessment instruments is available to interns ranging from measures of personality, intelligence/cognition, and achievement, as well as structured diagnostic interviews. Interns will receive one-on-one supervision on a weekly basis for this piece of their internship experience. Taken together, a broad range of assessment activities is available to interns.

Additional Training Opportunities

In addition to the required participation in individual, family, marital, or group psychotherapy, and assessment, there are opportunities to participate in:

Observation at the Therapeutic Preschool
Oversight of Case Management Services
Presenting to Community Agencies

Internship Stipend and Benefits

SCMHCC, Inc. will have two internship positions for the 2019-2020 year. The stipend for the internship year is $24,000. Benefits to include: paid holidays; eight hours per month of eligible vacation; eight hours per month of eligible sick leave, health and dental insurance at minimal cost to the intern, liability insurance, and discounted rate for YMCA membership.

Prospective interns will be required to pass a background check prior to being hired. If something is discovered during this process, it is ultimately left to the Executive Director's discretion as to whether an intern will be hired.

Offices

Interns have their own offices which they may decorate as they choose

Training Staff

LaSheena Barnes, Ph.D., T-LP

LaSheena Barnes is a T-LP in the Andover office. She completed her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Saint Louis University. She completed her internship at SCMHCC in August 2016 and her post doctoral residency at SCMHCC in August 2017. She has training and experience with individuals across the lifespan. She has a special interest in adolescents/families and young adults, as well as in psychological testing, but is comfortable seeing all individuals and presenting concerns. She regularly receives testing referrals for assessment of autism and developmental concerns. Her typical therapeutic approach is Integrative CBT, but she is comfortable utilizing different modalities to meet the needs of her clients. She uses a developmental approach in supervision, while presenting incremental challenges that encourage supervisees to expand their skillset and comfort level with clients of different backgrounds and with different presenting concerns. Interns inevitably gain experience with crisis assessment and management in this setting, as well as exposure to severe psychopathology. On a more personal note, LaSheena is very interested in reading and yoga (preferably with puppies). She enjoys animals and nature, from a safe distance. She’s a life-long learner and always looking for new experiences and challenges.

R. Scott Stegman, Psy.D., LP

Dr. Stegman is a licensed clinical psychologist with experience working with a variety of ages and populations from childhood to older adulthood, and from rural, suburban, and urban areas. He obtained his doctorate degree from Wheaton College in 2015. He specializes in insight oriented therapy which synthesizes several therapeutic approaches, including postmodern narrative constructs, psychodynamic theory, mindfulness, and CBT skill building. Dr. Stegman also coordinates testing services through South Central Mental Health, and is enthusiastic about personality assessment and the Rorschach Inkblot Test. Other professional interests include utilizing client religiosity in therapy, writing, and technology.

Jessica M. Stumpe, Psy.D., LP

Dr. Stumpe earned her doctorate degree in clinical psychology at the American School of Professional Psychology in Washington, D.C., in 2006. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma, and remains an avid Sooners fan. She joined the staff at South Central Mental Health in 2007, where she is the Clinical Coordinator in the Augusta office. Dr. Stumpe has a passion for training and her therapeutic interests are in applied behavior analysis and serving marginalized populations. In her free time, you might find her watching college football, crocheting, or running races.

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