Undergraduate students have access to clinical training commensurate with their level of education.
Hands-on Learning. Our students learn by doing. Under the direction of our prestigious faculty, students work in various centers and throughout the community, providing crucial services to the public and gaining vital experience.
The typical program of study (sequence of courses) for students who enter the CDS master's program after having completed bachelor's degree in CDS.
For students interested in applying, but who do not have a CDS Bachelor's degree, a leveling course sequence is available to obtain prerequisites. The CDS leveling courses are available entirely online.
Clinical diagnosis is the process of using assessment data to determine if the pattern of symptoms the person presents with is consistent with the diagnostic criteria for a specific mental disorder outlined in an established classification system such as the DSM-5 or I CD-10 (both will be described shortly). Any diagnosis should have clinical utility, meaning it aids the mental health professional in determining prognosis, the treatment plan, and possible outcomes of treatment (APA, 2013). Receiving a diagnosis does not necessarily mean the person requires treatment. This decision is made based upon how severe the symptoms are, level of distress caused by the symptoms, symptom salience such as expressing suicidal ideation, risks and benefits of treatment, disability, and other factors (APA, 2013). Likewise, a patient may not meet the full criteria for a diagnosis but require treatment nonetheless.
The Herculean task of revising the DSM began in 1999 when the APA embarked upon an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the DSM in coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO) Division of Mental Health, the World Psychiatric Association, and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
The assessment process involves three critical concepts – reliability, validity, and standardization . Actually, these three are important to science in general. First, we want the assessment to be reliable or consistent. Outside of clinical assessment, when our car has an issue and we take it to the mechanic, we want to make sure that what one mechanic says is wrong with our car is the same as what another says, or even two others. If not, the measurement tools they use to assess cars are flawed. The same is true of a patient who is suffering from a mental disorder. If one mental health professional says the person suffers from major depressive disorder and another says the issue is borderline personality disorder, then there is an issue with the assessment tool being used (in this case, the DSM and more on that in a bit). Ensuring that two different raters are consistent in their assessment of patients is called interrater reliability. Another type of reliability occurs when a person takes a test one day, and then the same test on another day. We would expect the person’s answers to be consistent, which is called test-retest reliability. For example, let’s say the person takes the MMPI on Tuesday and then the same test on Friday. Unless something miraculous or tragic happened over the two days in between tests, the scores on the MMPI should be nearly identical to one another. What does identical mean? The score at test and the score at retest are correlated with one another. If the test is reliable, the correlation should be very high (remember, a correlation goes from -1.00 to +1.00, and positive means as one score goes up, so does the other, so the correlation for the two tests should be high on the positive side).
Receiving a diagnosis does not necessarily mean the person requires treatment. This decision is made based upon how severe the symptoms are, level of distress caused by the symptoms, symptom salience such as expressing suicidal ideation, risks and benefits of treatment, disability, and other factors (APA, 2013).
The course is designed to: heighten the students’ sensitivity to the unique needs of consumers of diverse cultural origins; assist students to become culturally competent clinical rehabilitation counselors; and facilitate integration of knowledge, skills, and competencies necessary to provide quality services.
The RCP has the distinguished honor of being the first nationally accredited Rehabilitation Counseling program in the State of Louisiana. In 1988, the program received an Honorable Mention from the Commissioner of Rehabilitation Services Administration, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C. The RCP manages three long-term training grants and a national technical assistance center grant on Vocational Rehabilitation Technical Assistance Center for Targeted Communities (VR-TAC-TC): Project E3 (Educate, Empower, and Employ) funded by Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA), U.S. Department of Education. In addition, the department has a Field Initiated Research on Cooperative Learning and Individualized Mentoring to Build Self-Efficacy, Persistence, and Goal Attainment in Post-secondary African American Students with Disabilities (CLAIM) funded by the National Institute on Disability and Independent Living Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR).
This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of human development over a lifetime focusing on life stages of infancy, adolescence and adulthood incorporating cognitive, physical, and social development concerns.
Course Description: The course begins with a comprehensive prerequisite online session, followed by a three-day live course.
Course Description: The course begins with a comprehensive prerequisite online session, followed by a three-day live course.
Course Description: The course consists of four live, in-person days in a classroom setting.
Course Description: The course consists of four live, in-person days in a classroom setting.
This advanced level course, formerly known as Clinical Skills Update (CSU), focuses heavily on intensive clinical reasoning and problem solving through a high volume of patient demonstrations and case study analysis involving all regions of the spine as well as the extremities.
This 14-hour advanced level course consisting of lecture presentations, practical demonstrations and supervised practice is open to PTs, DCs, DOs, MDs, and ATCs who are Credentialed in MDT or have completed Parts A through D of the McKenzie MDT Education Programme.