A Career in Clinical Psychology

People weighing a career in psychology tend to run into two wide tracks early on: clinical psychology and counseling psychology. Clinical work, in particular, centers on building a picture of the patient. Practitioners run personality tests and broader psychological assessments, then use what those results reveal to diagnose and treat the conditions a patient has come in with.

The assessments themselves range from something as basic as an IQ test to other evaluation formats built for the same purpose. What they measure is the patient's mental machinery: how much they know, how well they reason, their verbal ability, memory, and how long they can hold their attention. Put simply, the point is to map out behavioral and logical patterns so the clinician has something concrete to work from.

Four main perspectives shape the field. There is the psychodynamic approach, the humanistic approach, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and systems or family therapy. Each frames mental illness differently and treats it on its own terms.

Psychodynamic therapy traces the roots of a disorder back into the patient's past, digging through childhood memories to find where things took hold. Humanistic therapy takes a different line, working to reconnect the person with the potential they were born with. Cognitive-behavioral therapy looks at the loop between thought, feeling, and action, and how the three feed one another. Family or systems therapy pulls the patient's relatives into the room, examining relationships and how the patient holds up within them.

As with counseling psychology, clinical psychology opens out into a number of specialties for anyone who wants to narrow their focus. Among them are health psychology, neuropsychology, geropsychology, and social behavior therapy.