SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE
Students enrolling in the new Community Mental Health Counseling Program for fall 2008 will receive a $5,000 scholarship for the first year of the program ($2,500 per semester, applied to tuition only). Students must be enrolled full-time. There is no separate application for this scholarship and applicants do not have to show financial need to receive this award, although US citizens and permanent residents are required to complete the FAFSA. Awards for the second and any subsequent years will be based on financial need. This scholarship is not available to students already enrolled at CIIS and is not applicable to the Community Mental Health Certificate program. More details will be announced as they become available.

NEW FALL 2008
M.A.Concentration in Community Mental Health

California Institute of Integral Studies announces a new degree concentration in Community Mental Health through its Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology program. Classes begin fall semester 2008.

Goals
CIIS has a long history of educating people to be licensed Marriage and family therapists. This new concentration in Community Mental Health is designed to respond to the mental health workforce crisis in California. The degree fulfills the academic requirements for the state of California license in Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT).

The CIIS Community Mental Health program has been designed to help build a culturally competent and diverse mental healthcare workforce specifically trained to provide effective therapeutic services to populations in the public sector.

Specific goals of the degree program include:

• Increase the number of counseling psychology graduates and psychotherapists from racially/ethnically and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds;
• Empower psychotherapists to provide counseling and mental health services that meet diverse clients’ needs and expectations, including those with severe mental illness; and
• Support students in forging fulfilling and effective careers in the public sector as opposed to private practice.

Collaboration

The program represents an important collaboration between the academic and public mental health sectors. Community and public agencies have indicated their interest in working with CIIS to develop and implement the program. An advisory council will help ensure that the program design continues to meet the needs of these agencies and will help strengthen the ties CIIS has to organizations that are the potential employers of our graduates.

Many professionals were consulted during the planning stage of the community mental health initiative.They were asked for their input regarding the need for a community mental health program and the training it would require. Clinics and treatment programs are now seeing clients who have severe psychopathology, dual and triple diagnosis, substance abuse, who belong to the Asian and Latino communities, and who may be impoverished and homeless. Therefore, directors and clinicians who were interviewed expressed unanimous support for the new program based on their experience of the level and type of therapy now required to serve an increasingly diverse community of clients.

Directors and clinicians indicated they look forward to working with CIIS graduates who will intern at their clinics or be hired as new staff. Having already received core course training in areas such as cultural competence and case management, the graduates will eliminate the need for clinic staff to spend valuable time training them in essential areas of client need. They will also enter the field with a greater level of expertise and be able to offer quality treatment to clients.

Program Format
Courses will be taught in a combination of weeklong intensives at the start of each fall semester, weekends, evenings, and online.

Learning Activities
As an integral part of their counseling psychology education, students will be introduced to the fundamentals of intensive and supplemental case management and the provision of public sector therapeutic services in order to prepare them to work effectively in collaborative, multidisciplinary teams with other mental health and primary care providers. Course work will be closely integrated with practicum work in community agencies, where students will be observed and counseled in their work with clients of diverse cultures and with complex and often severe mental health issues.