Capability-informed competency approach to lifelong professional development

This article highlights how syndemic processes related to the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, racial injustice, and economic instability serve as catalysts for transforming psychology education and training from a competency-based approach to a capability-informed competency model. This article overviews a syndemic theory to highlight the value of focusing on capabilities to enhance competence. It details the advantages of a capability-informed competency model for doctoral health service psychology education, training, and ultimately lifelong learning in which individuals are empowered to apply the diverse competencies they amass in new ways and settings to meet needs informed by the public good. To illustrate this approach, we provide examples of trainees' engagement and leadership in an academic health center's comprehensive response to the COVID-19 crisis, including transitioning neuropsychological assessment to a virtual platform, launching innovative services for frontline healthcare workers, facilitating antiracism programming, and designing and implementing interprofessional advocacy activities related to current social, economic, and health crises. These examples highlight new foci and strategies for a collaborative approach to socially responsive growth and development in psychology, ways to facilitate trainees' application of existing competencies to new domains, and faculty and trainee reactions regarding a shift toward a capability-informed competency approach. The article concludes with guiding principles for creating and implementing a culture that maximizes trainees' acquisition of traditional competencies and nurtures their capability to respond to social problems and facilitate the public good throughout the professional lifecycle. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) Impact Statement Public Significance Statement-The syndemic processes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, and economic instability are profoundly impacting psychology education and training. This article highlights ways to capitalize on these syndemic processes to transform psychology education and training. It offers a blueprint for a capability-informed competency-based training culture that nurtures and empowers trainees to address societal problems in novel and creative ways throughout the course of their careers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Promoting resilience in persons with serious mental health conditions during the Coronavirus pandemic.

This article highlights the profound and far-reaching impact of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) health crisis on persons with serious mental health conditions. To understand and mitigate against the negative effects of the crisis on this population, we offer a resilience intervention framework that attends to three key resilience processes, namely control, coherence, and connectedness (3Cs). We then detail interventions and associated evidence-informed intervention strategies at the individual, interpersonal, and systemic levels that behavioral health professionals can employ to bolster each of the 3Cs for persons with serious mental health conditions. These intervention strategies, which must be implemented in a flexible manner, are designed to enhance the biopsychosocial functioning of persons with serious mental health conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond and strengthen their interpersonal and systemic environments. We conclude with recommendations for future directions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Flattening the emotional distress curve: A behavioral health pandemic response strategy for COVID-19.

This article proposes a framework for managing the behavioral health impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic. This framework aligns and should be integrated with an existing public health pandemic intervals model. It includes six phases of a behavioral health pandemic response strategy: preplanning, response readiness, response mobilization, intervention, continuation, and amelioration. The ways behavioral health specialists can capitalize on their competence in the leadership, prevention, education, service, research, and advocacy domains within each behavioral health pandemic response phase are articulated. Behavioral health expertise can help ensure a more comprehensive, effective pandemic response that facilitates the flattening of the curve of disease spread, along with the corresponding emotional distress curve. A case illustration, the Caring Communities (CC) initiative, is offered as an exemplar of action steps in the leadership, prevention, education, service, research, and advocacy domains that behavioral health professionals can take within each of the behavioral health pandemic response phases. Key CC action steps include providing support groups, offering virtual wellness breaks, participating in educational outreach, creating and disseminating wellness guides, launching and leading a virtual behavioral health clinic for health care staff, participating in behavioral health research and program evaluation, and engaging in advocacy initiatives aimed at improving behavioral health care and addressing and reducing health disparities. Finally, recommendations for optimizing behavioral health contributions to future pandemic responses are proffered. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).