Clinical Psychology Curriculum and the Industrialization of Behavioral Health Care

This chapter discusses the clinical psychology curriculum and the industrialization of behavior healthcare as discussed by Pallak. According to this chapter, current curricula tend to focus on the individual as the unit of analysis. Programs essentially train students to be craftspeople in an outdated, cottage industry model of behavioral healthcare delivery. With the rise of managed care, however, psychologists are confronted with a much larger unit of analysis—namely, an organized care system. The prospect of expanding from an individual to a systems level may at first appear daunting; the task is largely one of applying methods of clinical science to larger units of analyses. The chapter provides an outline of some of the issues that emerge when one\u27s unit of analysis is a system as opposed to an individual. This chapter focuses the attention to the modification of clinical science curricula. The chapter concludes that many training programs may need to modify training in research methods to include these other methodologies that are more applicable to a systems level unit of analysis