Psychology

mhhe worked with the psychology network of the Higher Education Academy on organising a couple of meetings for psychology educators, which resulted in the establishemnt of the Psychology Network Mental Health Group.  Please get in touch if you are interested in reactivating these meetings.  We were also involved in supporting a psychology network mini-project and article about mental health in psychology - Don't Jump Ship - published in the Psychologist.

View the New Ways of Working for Psychology and psychological therapies pages.  

 

SCOPING ACCOUNT

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Author: Anne Cooke, Academic and research tutor in clinical psychology
Salomons, Canterbury Christ Church University College
mailto:a.cooke@salomons.org.uk

 

General note

Psychologists tend to think in terms of "abnormal psychology" or "psychological problems" rather than "mental health" which many argue is not a psychological concept. This makes it hard to be precise about which components of courses relate to "mental health".

1. Undergraduate teaching

"Abnormal psychology" is usually taught as a separate module in years 2 and/or 3 of undergraduate psychology courses. It is relatively uncommon for undergraduates to do placements in practice settings (an exception is Brunel University which runs "sandwich" psychology courses). However, graduates hoping for a career in clinical psychology generally spend at least two years as "assistant psychologists" in practice settings after graduating before obtaining a place on a professional training course.

2. Postgraduate courses relevant to mental health

The traditional postgraduate professional training for working in mental health is clinical psychology. These are three-year, doctoral level courses open only to psychology graduates. As a result of fierce competition for places, the average age of entry to these courses is 27 and most applicants have at least two years' relevant experience, usually in mental health and/or learning disability settings. The content of courses is regulated by the British Psychological Society and is designed to equip psychologists to work in the NHS. Much of the training relates broadly to "mental health", with an increasing emphasis on working with severe and enduring problems.

However, the training also covers working with other client groups such as older people, people with a learning disability and people with physical health problems. Much of the training is via practice learning and trainees generally undertake six, six month placements in NHS services, supervised by an NHS clinical psychologist. The usual pattern is three days a week on placement and two in college. Learning objectives for placements are set by courses and monitored via individual placement contracts and reports from supervisors. A member of course staff visits each trainee on each placement at least once.

Other postgraduate professional trainings relevant to mental health include educational psychology (generally at doctoral level), forensic psychology and counselling psychology (both generally at Masters level). Increasingly counselling psychologists are being employed alongside clinical psychologists in NHS settings. Psychology graduates are also being seen as a primary source for recruitment of the new graduate primary care workers (see: Society Guardian), and many of the training courses for these new workers are being run alongside clinical psychology programmes, for example at Salomons.

3. Key issues in learning and teaching about mental health in psychology

One of the key issues over recent years has been the development of psychological theories of and interventions for psychosis. These were summarised by the British Psychological Society in its 2000 report Recent Advances in Understanding Mental Illness and Psychotic Experiences. More recently training materials have been developed from the report. This development is part of a wider "turn to psychology" in mental health teaching which emphasises the continuum between "normal" and "abnormal" psychology and between "mental health" and "mental illness". Writing in the BPS Division of Clinical Psychology's journal Clinical Psychology, Harper (2003) summarises the thinking behind this development:

Some years ago a leading British researcher into psychosis remarked to me that the material covered in abnormal psychology textbooks was usually not psychological at all. He pointed out that they were entirely structured by psychiatric diagnostic categories, for which there was often little evidence of either reliability or validity. ... These texts developed psychological explanation son the back of these diagnoses rather than attempting psychological explanation of the phenomena which made up the categories. ... This is not to be anti-psychiatric or the sake of it but is about recognising that psychology has its own theoretical traditions and there is no reason to suddenly jump ship when faced with psychosis.

4. 'Cutting edge' areas of practice, development and research

  • Deconstructing "psychopathology"
  • Psychological formulation as an alternative to diagnosis (i.e not what category does this problem fit into, but what are the psychological - and other - processes that are maintaining this particular set of difficulties and how could these be changed?)
  • Psychology of psychosis
  • Cognitive theories of psychological problems - and cognitive therapy
  • Qualitative research
  • Evaluation of psychological therapies
  • Funding for psychological and social research as a balance to drug-company funded research
  • User involvement in practice and in training, and shared agendas with the user movement
  • Are we expert treaters or knowledgeable but collaborative allies?
  • Professional practice issues - e.g. proposed powers of compulsion for psychologists, should psychologists prescribe?
  • Shared learning (although very little is currently done in psychology)
  • Risk assessment and its limits
  • Effects of trauma and social adversity
  • Psychological approaches to "personality disorders"
  • Training other mental health workers in psychological approaches
  • Psychology as applied to social policy, for example the psychology of compulsion as applied to current proposals for reform of the Mental Health Act
  • Equal opportunities in clinical psychology training, for example for mental health service users and survivors
  • Critical psychology, for example examining the role of psychology in our society (Is psychological therapy "the opium of the people"?)
  • Community Psychology - should efforts directed at changing individuals be better directed at changing environments, for example via community development?

5. Key journals and websites

6. Professional Body

The professional body for psychologists is the British Psychological Society which has various Divisions, the largest of which is the Division of Clinical Psychology. There are also Divisions of Forensic, Educational and Counselling Psychology. The Society accredits programmes but assessment and the granting of awards is usually done by the HE institutions rather than by the Society. The Society has recently issued revised criteria for the accreditation of postgraduate training programmes in clinical psychology, based around a framework of required competencies.

 

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