Master’s Degree in Community Mental Health

The Master Program in Community Mental Health is a general program, preparing students to provide a variety of mental health services in a wide range of settings with special emphasis on clinical skills. Graduates are expected to offer counseling, health education, mild forms of psychotherapy, mental health research, advocacy activities, managing community mental health organization, case management, community mobilization and other types of clinical mental health care. The graduate will be equipped with generic skills in prevention, assessment and intervention with diverse groups of clients both in the community and service settings. This program adopts a holistic model of care emphasizing, in particularly, the cultural aspects of community mental health and community mental health promotion for all target groups. The program’s orientation is multidisciplinary, promoting dialogue between health disciplines in academic and clinical settings.
The Program offers a thesis track and a non-thesis track. The thesis track is highly recommended, especially for students with an interest in further education, research, or policy-related work. The thesis track consists of a total of 37 credit hours. These include 24 credit hours in 11 core courses; a thesis of 6 credit hours, 4 credit hours of residency and clinical practice; 2 elective course of 2 credits for each.
Students in the non-thesis track follow the same course of study including residency and clinical practice, with the exception of Thesis I and Thesis II. Instead, they take “graduation project”; 3-credit additional course from the elective courses list; 2 elective courses of 2 credits.
Lectures are scheduled on an average of 2-3 days per week. Practicum days are coordinated with the practice sites and according to the students’ individual needs.
Master’s Degree in Community Mental Health:  Psychotherapy track
The Master Program in Community Mental Health/ track psychotherapy (37 credit hours) is a specialized program, preparing students to provide a variety of psychotherapies for a wide range of mental and psychological problems in community settings with special emphasis on clinical skills. Graduates are expected to offer counseling and psychotherapy for clients of various age groups and diagnosis. The graduates are expected to provide health education, perform mental health research, lead advocacy activities, and manage community mental health organization.   The graduate will be equipped with generic skills in prevention, assessment and psychotherapy with diverse groups of clients both in the community and service settings. Specialized courses in cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, expressive therapy; individual, group, and family and couple therapy, are core courses in the program. In addition, this track emphasizes clinical expertise throughout the course of study, which should be acquired through direct contact with clients. Therefore, candidates for enrollment have to be employed at one of the mental health agencies and spend enough number of contact hours with clients during their residency and internship clinical placement. They are expected to spend 130 contact hours of fieldwork as internship in addition, to the scheduled credits in their academic plan. In total, the graduate of the psychotherapy track will spend around 430 hours (300 hours for psychotherapy residency courses 1 &2 and clinical at hospital and 130 hours for  practicum) of clinical work during their formal training and internship.
This program adopts a holistic model of care emphasizing, in particularly, the cultural aspects of community mental health and community mental health promotion for all target groups. The program’s orientation is multidisciplinary, promoting dialogue between health disciplines such as medicine, psychology, social work, and nursing both in academic and clinical settings. The students learn to coordinate their services with other team members and to work collaboratively for the welfare of their clients.