Hi everyone,
I'm hoping to get some thoughts/advice. I am an intern and am currently doing work on the neuropsych service (along with other clinical responsibilities) for 1-2 cases a week. Lately, my supervisor has been asking me to do work for him that is completely unrelated to my cases and is not a learning experience for me (e.g., scoring a battery). The time I need to take to do this takes away from my own scoring and report writing--I often spend 1-2 whole nights a week writing at home. This seems to smack of inappropriate. Do others think so? I could go to my TD and address it, but am hesitant to create problems for myself.
Thanks!
These types of situations are generally difficult for more than one of the people (if not all the people) who are involved (including the intern, the individual supervisor, and the training director). While it's a clear call (in terms of being an unethical expectation) if the supervisor was 'asking' the intern to do their private practice work for them (for financial benefit of the supervisor but offering no training/experiential benefit to the intern), in reality these situations tend to be far more complicated, especially when we are considering the 'grey area' type situations. That's when I think principle-driven moral/ethical reasoning has to kick in and each situation has to be analyzed contextually. And, of course, we are talking about situations for which the governing principles of APA Accreditation, state laws regarding the practice of psychology in that jurisdiction, and institutional policies/procedures do not offer a clear and ready solution.
I was a training director for a while at a place where I was under the administrative/clinical supervision of a director of psychology (departmentally) who was herself under the clinical director (also a psychologist) and these two commonly took on interns as supervisees. Sometimes there were differences of opinion between supervisor and supervisee regarding their duties and, while I had a good enough working relationship with the other two psychologists to be able to work things out in a way that was generally acceptable to everyone, the power differential was real and obviously exerts an influence on all parties involved. Although I saw myself as clearly having a primary role identification as a strong advocate for the intern's position/rights in any such situation I also tried to use it as an opportunity to model/instruct the intern regarding how to professionally and appropriately address any concern that you have with someone with administrative and clinical authority over you in a way that minimizes discord and maintains effective working relationships and also when a 'fight' over something minor with your boss/supervisor probably just isn't worth it...which I think is a good practical lesson to folks just coming out of graduate school where there can be an overemphasis on aspirational/idealized notions of the professional practice world to the negligence of practical realities. If one intern in any one particular year upon his/her exit interview rates down the clinical director supervisor in terms of their experience, then there is going to be little I can do since that person is my supervisor and this is easily dismissed as an 'outlier' attributable to that particular intern. However, if multiple interns do the same over the course of a few years and demonstrate a clear pattern, then at least there is something to use as data to drive an analysis of what it is about these interns' experiences that is attributable to the site/location/rotation/supervisor vs. what is attributable to that particular intern...and this can be brought to a training committee.
I think that the overall context regarding the general relationship between the intern and the site/supervisor makes a big difference on how these individual situations play out as well. While I was on internship I had a wonderful relationship with the training director and he and the site bent over backwards to offer good training opportunities and to be very flexible with me when I needed it (i.e., I felt like I was 'getting a lot' from them). Now, when that TD approached me and the other interns about doing some 'grunt work' (still appropriate as it involved giving/scoring a standardized questionnaire regarding medication side effects, albeit several hundred cases
) to get him out of a bind, we were more than happy to oblige given the nature of our relationship so far (we saw it as an opportunity to 'give back' to him and to the site). I don't see anything wrong with that. However, if our relationship had been characterized by exploitation beforehand or more generally, my reaction would have been quite different. I think it's important that interns learn that in the job world sometimes you have to do things that you don't really want to do (and things that, if you approach it like a lawyer, your job description does not 'technically' obligate you to do). One or a few instances of a boss asking you to do some 'grunt work' (and I have been on both ends of this type of situation, as a supervisor and as a supervisee) does not an exploitative/inappropriate situation make.
