UTRGV added a graduate course at the end of last fall which allowed six students to enroll in Integrative Primary Care for the College of Health Professions (COUN6380) this semester.
The course, taught by Associate Professor Selma Yznaga, typically meets every other week through the software application Zoom. The physical location of the course is on the Brownsville campus this semester and depends on the location of the students.
She will teach the course again in Spring 2020.
“The course is open to counseling students, clinical psychology students, social work students, rehab students, anybody in a mental health related training [graduate] field,” said Deepu George, a School of Medicine assistant professor.
Yznaga said the students are learning through a different model and are not trained to work in a primary care setting.
“Training them in this model, I think, gives them more marketability,” she said. “So, they have more opportunities for employment, but it also really helps them understand the model within which they’re going to work.”
George said most mental health training programs focus on training psychotherapists or people that do therapy or assessments.
“We know that a lot of people who actually receive any mental health care, they actually don’t receive it from a therapist or a mental health specialist,” he said. “They actually receive it when they visit their primary care doctor, or in another medical setting. There are no trained people in primary care settings to really address mental health issues at a primary care level.”
The students are being trained in mental health skills and learn how to translate that into a medical setting.
“You’re also expanding what your definition of behavioral health is,” George said. “Most people, likely, are to think about mental health or behavior health and say, ‘Oh, depression, anxiety,’ and then some really extreme things like bipolar, or schizophrenia.
“Whereas for a clinician like myself working in primary care, for us, behavioral health is a lot of things. It includes mental health, it includes health behaviors, it includes chronic disease management, it includes stress-length physical symptoms.”
He said, as an example, if a patient is being treated by a physician but the patient is going to the emergency room six times a month, it is a health behavior issue.
“The counseling students that are taking this class are learning how those things intersect, which are traditionally not focused in mental health training,” George said. “Traditional mental health training is not going to cover diabetes, for example … [or] weight loss.”
Yznaga said most people who are struggling with weight issues visit a primary care physician.
“But, it is largely a lifestyle choice, a behavioral health issue,” she said. “People don’t come to counseling. In general, for weight loss or weight management. They go to their doctor and their doctor doesn’t know exactly how to help them change their lifestyle or their behavioral choices.”
There are a lot of behavioral health issues that negatively impact health outcomes, Yznaga said.
“We are talking about things like smoking … physical activities, a lot of things we don’t necessarily address in counseling,” she said. “They’re learning a lot about those choices that they make, that make them feel sick.”
George said they like to remove the divide between the mind and body and are concerned about a patient’s health in general.
“We’re focusing on brief interventions in this course,” Yznaga said. “Another big distinction for our students is we focus on functionality. We assess what is wrong on a day-to-day basis. We’re not looking into deep psychological issues. We just want to know how we can help client patients improve their health on a day-to-day basis, where they are having impaired functioning and how we can improve that.”
She hopes to add a clinical skills course and two internship courses in the future. George said a clinical skills course would allow for students to gain a broad overview.
“On top of internship[s], … we spoke about having certain courses that are just specifically focused on Latino health issues and how does a primary care behavioral health respond to those with evidence-based behavioral intervention,” George said.
