Clinical Psychology
Clinical psychology is a branch of psychology that focuses on assessing, diagnosing, and treating mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders. Clinical psychologists often work directly with individuals to provide therapy and counseling, as well as conduct research to improve understanding and treatment of psychological issues.
7 Key excerpts on "Clinical Psychology"
eBook - ePub- Nicky Hayes(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
...6 Clinical Psychology In this chapter you will learn: the types of problem usually addressed by clinical psychologists the major methods in Clinical Psychology five different approaches to psychological therapy. Clinical Psychology is one of the oldest and most highly developed areas of applied psychology. It is the one that people most often think of when they think of the work that psychologists do – they think of counselling, therapy, helping people to recover from traumas or disasters, and so on. All of which are good reflections of the type of work that clinical psychologists are able to do. The scope of Clinical Psychology Clinical psychologists, as their name suggests, are trained to work with clinical problems: that is, psychological problems which have become so acute that they interfere with people conducting their day-to-day lives. Some clinical psychologists work in psychiatric hospitals, working closely with psychiatrists to help people who are suffering from a ‘mental illness’, or some other kind of severe problem in living. Some clinical psychologists work with other medical practitioners. It is becoming increasingly common, for example, for a clinical psychologist to work in a general medical practice, dealing with the type of problems which people bring to their doctor, but which are psychological in origin and better dealt with by a specialist in psychological matters. Insight People often do distinguish between psychologists and psychiatrists, but really they are quite different. A psychologist specializes in understanding the human mind, in both normal and abnormal conditions. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who specializes in illnesses and disorders. Others work with specialist treatment units of one kind or another. Paediatric clinics, for example, have clinical psychologists among the team members, who are able to provide psychological evaluations, guidance for parents, and therapy for children who need it...
eBook - ePubPsychology and Social Work
Applied Perspectives
- Gabriela Misca, Peter Unwin(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...Their aims are to understand, prevent and relieve psychological distress. Clinical Psychology can be considered as the original branch of psychology given that it emerged from the medical field of psychiatry, which had been concerned with finding cures for mental illnesses. The early work of Freud at the end of the nineteenth century saw the advent of claims of mental illness being cured through a novel method, the ‘talking cure’. However, it was only after the Second World War that the roots of Clinical Psychology as a discipline distinct from psychiatry started to emerge, leading to its professional recognition in the 1970s and 1980s. By contrast, counselling psychology has its roots in the humanistic paradigm influenced by postmodernist thinking, and it aims to apply psychological principles to psychotherapeutic practices in order to enhance growth, well-being and mental health. Counselling psychology is informed by values grounded in the supremacy of the counselling relationship, and its practice guidelines include the need to engage with clients empathically, to respect their accounts as valid, not to assume superiority of any particular way of experiencing, feeling and knowing, and to ‘recognise social contexts and discrimination and work in ways that empower rather than control and demonstrate high standards of anti-discriminatory practice appropriate to the pluralistic nature of society today’ (British Psychological Society, Division of Counselling Psychology, 2005: 1–2). Social workers will come into contact with a range of adults and children who are receiving different clinical inputs from the field of psychology – adults who are experiencing mental health problems, older people who have been bereaved, carers under stress, victims of sexual and other abuse...
eBook - ePubClinical Psychology
An Introduction
- Alan Carr(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Clinical practice refers to the assessment, treatment and prevention of psychological problems in a range of populations. For example, assessing a boy who is failing in school and defiant with parents and teachers; helping a woman with depression regulate her mood more effectively; or helping the family of a person whose psychotic symptoms have been reduced through using medication to develop a supportive style to prevent relapse. Clinical judgement is developed through supervised clinical practice while undertaking professional training, and during post-qualification clinical experience. Psychologists who have worked with a wide variety of cases over an extended time period have a broader experiential base on which to draw when making clinical decisions than their less experienced colleagues. Scientific knowledge about Clinical Psychology is developed through initial academic training, ongoing continuing professional development (CPD) and research. Throughout their careers clinical psychologists keep up to date with recent developments through CPD and must show evidence of this periodically to retain practising certificates. The scientific discipline Within the scientific discipline of Clinical Psychology, research is conducted to find out about how best to understand, assess, treat and prevent psychological problems, and also to find out how widespread psychological problems are. The results of Clinical Psychology research provide information for planning services for whole populations, and evaluating and treating individual cases in an evidence-based way. For example, the results of epidemiological research indicate that depression and anxiety are the most common problems that need to be addressed by clinical psychologists in outpatient adult mental health services (Carr & McNulty, 2006)...
- Amy E. Wenzel(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Psychology as a science studies topics such as perception, learning, memory, thinking, and social behavior and focuses on those interacting biological, behavioral, and cognitive processes that produce human psychological functioning. As an applied science in the health care domain, Clinical Psychology attends to those processes in developing and applying treatments for the patterns of signs and symptoms associated with mental health disorders. Medical interventions also play an important part in the treatment of mental health disorders, and clinical psychologists typically obtain their psychotherapy clients’ authorization to contact and stay in touch with their other health care providers so as to be alert to pertinent physical health issues and to be familiar with clients’ regimens of prescribed medication. In their role as psychotherapists, clinical psychologists usually see their clients more often than other providers do and are in a position to monitor medication side effects and clients’ fidelity to dosage and scheduling protocols. In some jurisdictions in the United States, psychologists with specialized additional training are licensed to prescribe some of the medications used in mental health treatment. Traditions and Orientations in Psychotherapy In 1600, John Downame, a puritan minister in London, described the treatment of irrational anger by “spiritual physicke,” a form of counseling in which he tactfully accepted clients’ perspectives on life’s injustices and met their heated outbursts with what he described as silence, soft and mild answers, wholesome counsel, and good admonitions. Drawing from the ancient theory of humors, Downame believed that anger arose from an excess of yellow bile in the body and that treatment should be prescribed from the words of the Holy Scriptures. This early form of mental health treatment cited biological factors as the cause and psychological intervention as the treatment of a common and distressing disorder...
eBook - ePubClinical Psychology
A Modern Health Profession
- Wolfgang Linden, Paul L. Hewitt(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Clinical Psychology, on the other hand, denotes a profession that creates and applies knowledge from many subspecialties within psychology and uses these to solve everyday problems across all aspects of health care. While the paragraph above describes what clinical psychologists do, it does not inform the reader how clinical psychologists think. Scientific training affects the view of a psychologist’s own profession and the world at large and also explains the habits and values of clinical psychologists. Three such overarching principles were first described by Galileo (yes, that Galileo), and training in these creates an enduring mindset that permeates our approaches to research and practice. Machado and Silva (2007) describe them as: Observation/experimentation, which essentially reflects the activities, such as methodology, that are used to generate theories and test hypotheses; Quantification/mathematization, which reflects the use of statistical procedures and mathematics to obtain and test data to determine relationships; Theoretical/conceptual analysis, which reflects the clear explication and detailed specification of concepts, constructs, and ideas that derive from or are the focus of research. Image 1.1 Psychologists on a Date © Dan Piraro, Bizzaro.com. Reprinted with permission. All three of these components are important to truly understanding the nature of relationships among psychological constructs; however, Machado and Silva (2007) argue that only the first two tend to be used in psychology research or taught in psychology training programs. For example, although there are courses and emphases in the field on methodological and statistical issues, the issues germane to conceptual analysis tend to be ignored (also see Machado, Lourenco, & Silva, 2000)...
eBook - ePubProfessional Issues in Clinical Psychology
Developing a Professional Identity through Training and Beyond
- Will Curvis, Will Curvis(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Clinical psychologists utilise neuropsychological assessment across a wide range of services, most commonly in acute hospital settings, brain injury services, dementia/memory assessment services, educational settings and learning disability services (BPS, 2012b). Neuropsychological assessments might be used in these contexts to understand the impact of an acquired brain injury (e.g., stroke, traumatic brain injury), assess changes in cognitive functioning over time to monitor progressing dementia, explore the cognitive strengths and difficulties of a child struggling at school or establish an individual’s overall intellectual ability and needs. Within healthcare services, clinical psychologists are often regarded as experts in hypothesis-driven neuropsychological and cognitive assessment, and professional guidance states that in-depth neuropsychological assessment should involve a qualified clinical psychologist (BPS, 2012b). Clinical psychologists are trained to have a baseline level of expertise in neuropsychological assessment and formulation, fulfilling core competencies as part of doctorate training. Following this, some clinical psychologists also go on to complete additional qualification (composed of theoretical and clinical work) to join a specialist register of clinical neuropsychologists (Collerton & Domone, 2014). Neuropsychological assessment is a broad and complex area. Experiencing ethical and professional dilemmas when providing neuropsychological assessment in practice has helped to shape our professional identities within the context of Clinical Psychology. We will reflect on some of these experiences over the chapter. Inter-disciplinary working Increasingly, clinical psychologists are employed to work within multidisciplinary teams (MDTs), working collaboratively with other professional disciplines such as psychiatry, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and nursing...
eBook - ePubSupervision and Clinical Psychology
Theory, Practice and Perspectives
- Ian Fleming, Linda Steen, Ian Fleming, Linda Steen(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Clinical Psychology programmes generally teach trainees to play an active role in the supervision process (for instance via negotiating placement contracts). Hitchen et al. (1997) describe an innovative workshop for Oxfordshire Clinical Psychology supervisors put on by supervisees. Despite this it is interesting to ponder Carroll’s remark below, especially given the finding from the survey that Clinical Psychology trainees’ views about the effectiveness of supervisor training are not sought generally: It would seem that supervisees are passive vis-à-vis supervision, have few expectations from which to negotiate with supervisors, and are prepared to ‘fall in’ with supervisor ways of setting up and engaging in supervision. (Carroll, 1996:92) Conclusions If we return to the remarks quoted at the beginning of this chapter how do we assess them with regard to Clinical Psychology in the UK? On balance, it is difficult to deny the situation described by Edwards because there are many active supervisors who have not received any specific training in supervisory skills, and because there is a paucity of data about current practice with which to discuss variability. For a number of reasons discussed earlier this situation is changing and will continue to do so in the near future. Laing’s remarks will remind us that training is only a start to change in practice and no guarantor of it. As psychologists we need to learn from the extensive literature on behaviour change, and its maintenance, if supervisor training is to have its intended effect. Clinical Psychology is a rapidly developing profession in the UK. Prequalification training involves spending at least 50 per cent of the training period learning clinical skills on placement and receiving supervision from a qualified practitioner. Until recently little attention has been paid, in general, to the tasks and skills of these supervisors...
