Inclusion and collaboration: only us
Surviving Clinical Psychology addresses a range of experiences throughout its chapters and includes many examples of adversity, psychological distress and health difficulties more broadly. In editing this book, it was very important for me to challenge multiple falsehoods of clinical psychology (and the helping professions more broadly). One such notion was the idea that individuals experiencing any form of psychological distress are in some way different to the likes of you and I. When working in an in-patient unit as a health-care assistant, I recall a person asking me: âHow on earth do you do this?â I recall their surprise, when my answer was simply, âI just start from the point in which this could be myself or any one of my family in here, and I start from thereâ.
Surviving Clinical Psychology welcomes many authors who just like those who access our support, identify as having their own lived experiences of psychiatric services, mental health difficulties, and/or societal adversities. Key to this is a rejection of the discursive divides of us and them, and an opening up of dialogues around what it means to sit on both sides of the proverbial therapy chair â to be practitioner and someone with lived experience of distress. As such, Surviving Clinical Psychology resigns âcase studiesâ to a clinical psychology that has pathology rather than social justice at its core, and invites readers instead, to think about psychological distress as defined by those who have experienced it themselves. After all, âthe ultimate power is the power to define. We have that power. Letâs define our experiences⌠for ourselves. Letâs define the worldâ (Kinouani, 2017).
Surviving Clinical Psychology thus sets out a new vision for clinical psychology that draws its lessons from the lived experience and accounts of the people themselves. Similarly, then, in writing about pre-qualified practice within clinical psychology, this book acknowledges that we must create contexts for individuals and communities to be heard. This book aims to be one such platform. Within these pages, individuals from minoritised groups and those traditionally margin-alised from the profession, share their accounts and highlight their vision for what clinical psychology can become. Writing in collaboration with those from across all stages of their career, the authors within this book have contributed to a larger story of advocacy, mentorship and support in process and practice â through coming together, sharing, collaborating, challenging one another, writing, and consulting far and wide. For âomission is a powerful statementâ (Starr & Weiner, 1981) and in some ways, this book offers a counter-statement to the profession â inclusion is a powerful action.
Reflective activity: joining the conversation
As this book is about and for you, it would be short-sighted to not have you involved in some way, shape or form. As such, we invite you to contribute to the topics discussed in this book. Perhaps you would like to share your reflections about some of the activities included, to add to the debates, or to share your own experiences. Importantly, this is about clinical psychology welcoming your perspective to the fold. This is a clinical psychology that reaches out.
Join the conversation at #SurvivingClinicalPsychology
Social justice and community psychology
This book celebrates what clinical psychology can become with you on its side, acknowledging a need for something to change. This is a profession whose history is rooted in disconnecting individuals from their social context. A profession that has secured status and a powerful standing within the professional market, through predominantly placing the impetus for change on the individual. Clearly, âweâre working hard, and working harder isnât working. The sense of a particularly individual incompetence [creeps] in. This is the dirty work of isolationâ (Reynolds, 2019, p. 7).
From within the walls of clinical psychology itself, Surviving Clinical Psychology tries to disentangle clinical psychology from this purely self-centred point of view. The connotations here are purposeful. On the one hand, clinical psychology needs to look beyond the individual and to address the needs of communities. In doing so, the profession has to take very seriously that we are already well aware of the key determinants for psychological distress and poor health (e.g., poverty, homelessness).
Surviving Clinical Psychology then, attempts to invite you to (re)consider your personal and professional development, with the political very much at the fore-front throughout. As understandable as it is to aspire for a sanitised and âclear-cutâ science, this book cannot accept a clinical psychology without politics. A clinical psychology without politics at its heart would only be reputable in as far as it is farfetched and unintelligible; dangerously decontextualised from the lived reality of hardship and distress and the potential of such an approach to do harm itself.
Surviving Clinical Psychology opens up a dialogue that invites you to join others already addressing the social and material conditions that lead to poor health and psychological distress. The third-sector, charities, grassroot groups, and service-user organisations, among many others, have been leading the way on much of this work for decades, and it is time we started to seriously listen to them and take action together.
In focus: the context and language of survival
In naming this book, I chose to use the language that resonated for those within the pre-qualification community. Through years of consultation and representation, the message was clear: for individuals hoping to one day train as a clinical psychologist, the journey is often experienced as turbulent and something to survive. The message has uncomfortable undertones, particularly in relation to the relative privileges aspiring psychologists are often afforded. Also uncomfortable in light that something so hoped for and aspired for â could also warrant a survival of sorts. This on the one hand, reflects the unclear routes to training and structural uncertainties embedded in a hugely popular, yet under-resourced career path. On the other, unqualified practitioners often find themselves in services overstretched, under-funded and facing financial cuts â fostering and perpetuating the very conditions that increase a demand upon our services in the first instance. And so, prequalified practitioners find themselves seriously considering ways in which to survive such detrimental conditions and the negative impact such conditions have on their own mental and physical wellbeing. Secondly, they find themselves considering ways to sustain themselves during difficult times, in order to ...