A mile away from Earl K. Long Hospital, the Admiral Motel displays weekly rates of $79.50. Abandoned strip malls and boarded-up restaurants dot the Airline Highway roadside, and across the street from the hospital, even the Bank One office is missing shingles.
However, for the past 22 years, Phil Brantley has offered LSU’s psychology doctoral students an externship program here at Earl K. Long, the state’s charity hospital, which provides mental health care for the patients while giving his students valuable hands-on training.
He designed the program to give doctoral students the opportunity to work side by side with medical professionals and provide mental health care to uninsured or low-income people.
The January 1999 issue of the American Psychology Association’s newsletter, the APA Monitor, called Brantley’s program a model training program in clinical psychology.
Brantley said the externship program prepares his students for the internship all psychology graduate students must complete after their four years of higher education.
Karen Wood, a third-year doctoral student, said she had never worked with a low-income population.
“If someone is having a panic attack, but they can’t pay their rent or their electric bill, then that’s going to take priority,” Wood said. “We’re working with a population that has so many stressful life events.”
According to Brantley, two out of seven people in Louisiana depend on public health care.
Since 1980, Brantley’s Earl K. Long externship program has trained more than 500 medical residents, published 100 scholarly titles and raised $2.5 million in grant funding. The National Institute of Health provided half of that funding.
Gareth Dutton, a third-year doctoral student, said the program prepares its students with the hands-on experience.
“You can prepare for a patient, but you never know what curve balls they’ll throw you,” Dutton said.
Eighty percent of the graduate students have gone to some of the nation’s most prestigious hospitals, such as Mayo Clinic and M.D. Anderson Cancer Research Center.
Brantley researches how people adapt to and manage chronic medical illnesses, such as diabetes and obesity, by using a combination of cognitive and behavioral psychological methods.
He uses this combination to help people take their medicine.
The behavioral techniques sound simple, Brantley said. The students help patients structure their environment to remind them to take their medicine. For example, they recommend patients put their medicine on the dinner table if they must take it with food.
He uses cognitive techniques, however, to reduce a patient’s negative attitude toward taking medicine.
“Some people associate taking medicine with weakness,” Brantley said. “Or if they start to feel better, they may not take it.”
The APA Monitor’s report lauded the teamwork between the primary-care physicians and the psychologists. By working together, the physicians can learn about the psychological aspects of health; and because a psychologist is present, a patient is more likely to go to treatment.
“Most patients don’t have major psychological diseases,” Brantley said. “They are suffering from mood disorders or anxiety disorders.”
The students’ training begins their first semester of enrollment, and they gain more administrative and supervisory roles as they advance through graduate school.
Wood and Dutton each work 20-25 hours a week at Earl K. Long and also supervise the first- and second-year students. They have their own patients and do paperwork, phone screenings and patient contacts.
“It’s very similar to experience with a hospital in the real world,” Wood said. “And that’s the point.”