Psychology student | Volunteer For Clinics

Are you a psychology student? Do you want to do activities with clients to contribute to their recovery? You are very welcome! In doing so, we offer you additional digital group intervision provided by university lecturers.

What are you going to do?
Arkin is the largest medical mental healthcare organization in Amsterdam. In our admission clinics and recovery clinics, clients with psychiatric problems are admitted. They stay for shorter or longer periods to stabilize, recover, and resocialize. Precisely because of these complex problems, a recovery-oriented treatment is worked on with the clients.

With the activities you will do with them, the starting point is: what *can* someone do, what possibilities are there? From there, work is done on a perspective of recovery that often begins with small steps. You can play a beautiful role in this because you come from the outside. From your position in society, you provide that little bit of equal attention that brings relaxation and expresses acceptance. In doing so, dignity and safety come first.

As a volunteer, you have equal contact at eye level. It is therefore not the intention that you fall into a provider pattern or start coaching clients. That is for the professionals. Therefore, and due to privacy considerations, you cannot be known in medical files or diagnoses or participate in treatment discussions.

We would love to hear about your skills, hobbies, and wishes and will tailor this to our possibilities. You can think of the following activities:

• You offer hospitality in the common room. You are there for a chat, you invite clients for a cup of coffee or tea, a conversation, a game, or a creative activity (one-on-one or with several clients). Together with clients, you keep the room tidy or you tidy up their own rooms with the clients. In this way, you contribute to the therapeutic living environment.
• You prepare healthy, simple meals with clients: doing the shopping, cooking, consuming the meal together (also with staff), and cleaning up.
• You facilitate creative activities with activity coordinators or you bring your own hobbies in there. You can play sports with one or more clients in our sports hall. Or you go outside to do something with a client, the latter in consultation with the nursing staff.
• Sometimes it is possible that when you and a client have a good click with each other, you can be paired together as buddies.
• There is also room for organizing and facilitating activities that you enjoy and have a passion for.

A second volunteer can be deployed for all these activities, so if you know someone in your network who is also interested, please let us know. For our clients, continuity and structure are important, and therefore we assume that you want to commit for at least 6 or 12 months, for example 4 hours or more per week or 2 weeks. Depending on the clinic where you will be deployed, this can be during the day, early evening, on all weekdays and weekends.

• You are following an academic study in psychology, forensic psychology, or educational sciences, etc.
• You have an affinity with the client group.
• You want and are able to do activities with mental healthcare clients in an equal and informal way. Because the clients have not yet recovered, they do not always communicate and react logically.
• You are aware that substantive guidance and treatment are the responsibility of the professionals, not you.
• You are socially skilled and can reflect on your own behavior.

A Certificate of Good Conduct (VOG) is a standard part of our application procedure, so that together we ensure a safe and reliable working environment.