Training, skills, and leadership experience: The need to expand clinical psychology training as illustrated by psychology leadership stories.

Training for clinical psychologists is grounded in training models emphasizing clinical work, scholarship, and research. Rigorous competencies, varying by clinical specialty area, guide the specifics of training within domains of knowledge, skills, and aptitudes-with the goal of ensuring well-trained clinical psychologists. Research further illuminates the skills, characteristics, and experiences needed to maximize the effectiveness of clinical care provided by trained clinical psychologists. In addition, data indicate that clinical psychologists spend an average of 20% of their work time in management and leadership activities beyond clinical duties of direct care, requiring expanded and additional skills beyond those formally conceptualized and broadly included in graduate training. We utilize descriptions of three clinical psychologists' leadership journeys to illustrate the gap in training filled by these bootstrapping autodidacts when successes led to promotion to higher levels of responsibility and leadership. Our proposed solution is a call to action. We call for consideration of an expansion of clinical psychology training by (a) overtly translating currently taught clinical skills into needed leadership skills to consistently fill the gap rather than relying on individuals to acquire enough experience to adequately perform the translation themselves, and (b) adding both pragmatic and theoretical leadership skills into an expanded training curriculum. We strongly urge this rethinking and expansion of training to adequately support and foster future clinical psychologists in administrative and other leadership roles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Posttraumatic stress symptom change after family involvement in veterans' mental health care.

Research indicates that veterans would like their families to be more involved in their mental health care. While Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) policy requires certain providers to discuss veterans' interest in family involvement in their mental health care, no published studies have examined the associations between family involvement and mental health outcomes in routine VA mental health care. This study assessed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms before and after veterans' first family session to test whether symptoms changed after family inclusion. The study used administrative data from VA medical records from 2008-2013. Veterans included in the present study sample had at least one assessment of PTSD symptoms in the year prior to and following their first family session (N = 6,107). Multilevel models tested whether PTSD symptoms changed over time. Moderator analyses assessed whether the change in PTSD symptoms differed depending on the veteran's gender, psychiatric comorbidities, and intensity of family involvement following the first session. On average, results showed statistically, but not clinically, significant reductions in PTSD symptoms after the first family session. Women veterans, veterans with comorbid depression, and those who had eight or more family sessions showed stronger symptom reductions than others. This study provides provisional evidence that family involvement is associated with PTSD symptom reduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).