There is a difference between what working clinical psychologists view as issues (including limits to career progression, service under investment, role dilution, burnout) and the wider issues that impact on the profession. - How to deal with increasing mental health demand with increasingly limited...

In my recent AP post I did not have a supervisor, as there was no lead Psychologist at my site, which means I had no one to ask for advice when I was unsuccessful in my doctorate application this year, and thus don't really know how to improve next year. This lack of understanding to why my written...

I don't have any robust evidence about the reason for this, although I there are counselling psychologists at all kinds of levels within the NHS. However, when I was doing my DClinPsy, I spent quite a bit of time with the DCounPsy trainees at the same university and observed the following: - Whereas...

Well here's the problem. I'm going to be studying at the University of Bristol soon and, as far as I can tell, they do not have any clinical psychology modules. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that aspiring clinical psychologists look at these courses and their utter lack of clinical subject...

OP you may benefit from reading Martha Stark's Modes of Therapeutic Action . Although the book is more about the underlying mechanisms of therapy, she proposes an interesting framework of 3 models about how different types of therapy are conceptualised. Taken from the blurb Model I is about knowledg...

On my conversion course I met several people who had enrolled in the belief that clinical psychology was basically a prestigious and well-paid type of counselling, and that educational psychology was therapy with children. They weren't prepared for the science and research methods involved (especia...

Good to see you old timer. It's been too long. It sounds to me like you are advocating 'the personal is political' here, which is nice, haven't seen that in a while... can you please explain to me how you see that working as a therapeutic tool when it was essentially designed as an ongoing political...

I love, love, love these kind of theoretical posts, and wish there were more of them. My sense is that this vision of cultivating individual rationality – you might call it cognitive robustness – is rooted in a paradigm of enlightenment liberalism. Firstly, I would argue that post enlightenment libe...

I wonder if a cohort difference may be being played out? As someone who is more of Maven's generation than the new graduates, I think lectures may be quite different experiences than people going through the system today. 'When I were a lad', the largest lectures would have about 80 or so people (an...

When you are starting out it's easy to get hung up on the content of a job, but the further I progress in my career I have realised it's often the context of the role that is far more important. A prestigious job on paper may be quite destructive if the team is toxic, the workload punishing or the p...

I was just wondering, if I changed my mind about becoming a Counsellor after completing the course, would the MSc help me to gain jobs as APs or RAs? Or would they be placing more value on other types of training/jobs? There isn't a straightforward answer to this, as it will depend on the opportuni...

from a purely therapeutic intervention, what would potentially make a CP better at delivering those therapies? I would echo Miriam's comments, and always cite Roth and Fonagy's work in What works for whom: A critical review of psychotherapy research . In a nutshell, its more about therapeutic rappo...

1) Its worth looking at some back issues of clinical psychology forum, as there have been BME trainees who have written about their experiences there over the last few years, and have made some interesting views. Off the top of my head, here are some things that could help: = Trainees mentoring BME ...

I would also be interested in this if there was any data about this topic of AP hiring and diversity. There is more of this at the qualified level, and also within the broader NHS workforce, but it is really hard to get hold of this with earlier career routes.

This is a very common frustration, and comes under the broader category of "why does course X look for arbitrary selection criteria Y". That said I would challenge a few assumptions. I am still baffled as to why my unrelated, undergrad degree has such a strong bearing on my ability to gain access to...