Thinking of training to be a counsellor/therapist. (Clubman - resist!! down boy!). Years ago I took a degree (Psychology). Didn't go down that road career-wise, but now feel I could be a good counsellor. I am looking at various courses and seeking advice from the 'Association' in that regard, but if any poster/reader is already a counsellor/psychotherapist I would appreciate any advice. For example, would the degree in Psychology be of any help, or would I basically start training "from scratch". Any advice welcome.
Counselling/Psychotherapy
- Thread starter Audrey
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A degree in psychology is an enormous advantage.
Would you not be better off doing a post-grad qualification? The pay for Clinical & Counselling Psychologists is substantially better than for counsellors - and with good reason. (I'll duck here!) There are an awful lot of micky-mouse courses in counselling and there are an awful lot of people who make up a counselling method and sell it on as training. They make a lot of money & yes I have been tempted. What kind of counselling or psychotherapy method are you drawn to? Some are based on scientific research, most aren't. Have you looked at the PSI website (www.psihq.ie) or the Irish Council for Psychotherapy (website unfinished last time I looked)? Some trainings are likely to be lengthy, others expensive, some both. You need to see who is accrediting them too. If you want you can set yourself up as the Irish Institute for Expensive Therapy and accredit your own course in the latest thing ie Expensive Therapy, and by god a lot of people are doing this in Ireland. Obviously I'm a proponant of evidence based therapies and am biassed.....
Would you not be better off doing a post-grad qualification? The pay for Clinical & Counselling Psychologists is substantially better than for counsellors - and with good reason. (I'll duck here!) There are an awful lot of micky-mouse courses in counselling and there are an awful lot of people who make up a counselling method and sell it on as training. They make a lot of money & yes I have been tempted. What kind of counselling or psychotherapy method are you drawn to? Some are based on scientific research, most aren't. Have you looked at the PSI website (www.psihq.ie) or the Irish Council for Psychotherapy (website unfinished last time I looked)? Some trainings are likely to be lengthy, others expensive, some both. You need to see who is accrediting them too. If you want you can set yourself up as the Irish Institute for Expensive Therapy and accredit your own course in the latest thing ie Expensive Therapy, and by god a lot of people are doing this in Ireland. Obviously I'm a proponant of evidence based therapies and am biassed.....
Thanks Gordanus. Your response was well worth reading. Yes I've attempted to access the Association's website, but hadn't tried the other one which I'll have a look at now. I've also been looking carefully at who's accrediting which courses. Thanks for your help and I'll thread carefully, don't worry!
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Andrewa said:
Andrewa - the following comments I am a State Registered Art Psychotherapist (for Gordanus' benefit, that is a Master's level postgraduate 3-year full-time university training).........plus a barrow-load of other 'paper' qualifications including a psychology degree. For the last 15 years I am senior (lead) clinican in a community-based psychiatric facility working with adults with acute mental health problems.
With your undergraduate Psychology degree you may apply for a post-doctoral Clinical Psychology training. Be warned there are many more applicants than places; you would need to have achieved a 2:1 Degree or higher and the subsequent three years of hospital-based training are not well remunerated. Qualification as a Clinical Psychologist is not a training as a therapist or psychotherapist! There are sub-specialisms of Clinical, Health, Organisational and Educational Psychology. Information here http://www.psihq.ie
It is confusing to use the nomenclature 'Counselling' and 'psychotherapy' as if they were interchangeable; counselling is based on the life-experiences and dilemmas of the client. Carl Rogers' idea of 'unconditional positive regard' is a central motif of most counselling trainings.
Psychotherapy is a treatment modality which works with the unconscious of the patient. I don't need to explain or defend it as I see the transformative effects of my work on a daily basis in patients' lives. There are a number of university-based trainings developed in the last 10 years in Ireland including TCD, UCD and UCC. All are accredited by (usually UK) training institutions. You need to be aware that they are long difficult and expensive - one essential being the requirement to engage in your own psychoanalytic exploration as a patient. Further information here [broken link removed] If I can be of further help you can contact me direct.
Great post Marie. Mrs Purple is a qualified Psychiatrist, now working as a GP and she often gives out about all the councillors who have no real qualification and often do more harm than good as they can come from a very biased viewpoint and can colour their patients’ views with their own biases.
Marie said:
O dear, I can find myself getting picky now... Clin Psychol is a doctoral level qualification; after obtaining this one can go on to post-doc work.
"It is confusing to use the nomenclature 'Counselling' and 'psychotherapy' as if they were interchangeable; "
And yet most people do; mainly because there is no definitive definition of either.
"counselling is based on the life-experiences and dilemmas of the client. Psychotherapy is a treatment modality which works with the unconscious of the patient."
Is an opinion; not all in the field would agree.
" I don't need to explain or defend it as I see the transformative effects of my work on a daily basis in patients' lives. "
I'd rather see solid research; the anecdotal approach is no longer sufficient, just as it is no longer sufficient in medicine. The most researched therapy, which is also heavily researched as to effectiveness is cognitive behavioural therapy; Marie would presumably not regard this as a psychotherapy. That's my tuppence worth! I'll not say anymore.
DrMoriarty
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Does this mean you have to be a bit nuts to become a psychotherapist?Marie said:
[Joke, JOKE...!]
YES Doc M! - you have to be mad to do this work!
Gordanus I don't want to get into fisticuffs and semantical high-wire trapeeze work! An e-mail is an e-mail is an e-mail and I don't sit around pondering or editing. I meant - of course - that Clinical Psychology is a post-graduate training. Yourself and Andrewa both know this - so does Purple and Mrs. P but the other 2,000 folk who read the thread may not so (ahem!) accuracy.
Now on to the remarks in your last post on evidence-base. There are major issues and a major debate on this and it does not belong or fit in a forum such as AAM. In passing it is instructive that the basic postgraduate Clinical Psychology 3-year training (which incidentally was recently upgraded to doctorate level here in the UK) has changed dramatically in the past 15 - 20 years away from the 'objective science' which it unsuccessfully aspired to be during my training to a more balanced qualitative-quantitative fifty-fifty approach with more space for the pastoral relationship based on the psychoanalytic, or the cognitive-behavioural, or the systemic approaches. Recommendations from government and Department of Health here for best practice in mental health advocates that different approaches based on different models be available to patients. Cognitive-behavioural approaches ('CBT') is currently popular because it is the approach which can be most easily assessed and manualised. However it might be important to point out that psychoanalytically-based therapists frequently find themselves working with clients whose symptoms have been addressed by CBT who then spring completely different difficulties or who - though the original phobia or depression etc. no longer troubles them, when this surface manifestation of underlying distress is gone, find they are in deepest merde and come to work with the likes of me for a couple of years! CBT and more cognitively-based methods are also not accessible to a wide range of individuals (for various reasons too complicated to go into here). The criteria for 'evidence base' itself is a subject of academic and clinical debate.
Individuals have been and will be in the future 'conned' by charlatans and chancers who read a few books or do a weekend course and over-enthusiastically offer to magic away all suffering and psychological distress. However it is not accurate to apply the criticism of charlatanism to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically-based therapies offered by state-registered well-trained responsible practitioners. Suicide rates, self-destructive behaviour and drug-addiction increase year on year, especially among young men, this group having perhaps the biggest struggle of adjustment and sense-making in a rapidly-changing culture. This is a group which finds it very difficult to articulate its problems and has extreme difficulty asking for help (as indeed do immigrants and individuals from ethnic minorities). Help for these groups entails a great deal more than twelve CBT sessions focussing on agrophobia, or learning strategies to cope with depression. It entails a profound engagement with the persons existential being including his unconscious pain and terror. Disparaging the few psychoanalytically-trained practitioners who can do and are prepared to do this work, attitudes of contempt in the public domain towards these deeper explorations and sense-making, risk cutting these individuals off from a vital chance.........as well as reducing the richness of the culture in closing down diversity and complexity.
Different people need different approaches, its "horses for courses".
Gordanus I don't want to get into fisticuffs and semantical high-wire trapeeze work! An e-mail is an e-mail is an e-mail and I don't sit around pondering or editing. I meant - of course - that Clinical Psychology is a post-graduate training. Yourself and Andrewa both know this - so does Purple and Mrs. P but the other 2,000 folk who read the thread may not so (ahem!) accuracy.
Now on to the remarks in your last post on evidence-base. There are major issues and a major debate on this and it does not belong or fit in a forum such as AAM. In passing it is instructive that the basic postgraduate Clinical Psychology 3-year training (which incidentally was recently upgraded to doctorate level here in the UK) has changed dramatically in the past 15 - 20 years away from the 'objective science' which it unsuccessfully aspired to be during my training to a more balanced qualitative-quantitative fifty-fifty approach with more space for the pastoral relationship based on the psychoanalytic, or the cognitive-behavioural, or the systemic approaches. Recommendations from government and Department of Health here for best practice in mental health advocates that different approaches based on different models be available to patients. Cognitive-behavioural approaches ('CBT') is currently popular because it is the approach which can be most easily assessed and manualised. However it might be important to point out that psychoanalytically-based therapists frequently find themselves working with clients whose symptoms have been addressed by CBT who then spring completely different difficulties or who - though the original phobia or depression etc. no longer troubles them, when this surface manifestation of underlying distress is gone, find they are in deepest merde and come to work with the likes of me for a couple of years! CBT and more cognitively-based methods are also not accessible to a wide range of individuals (for various reasons too complicated to go into here). The criteria for 'evidence base' itself is a subject of academic and clinical debate.
Individuals have been and will be in the future 'conned' by charlatans and chancers who read a few books or do a weekend course and over-enthusiastically offer to magic away all suffering and psychological distress. However it is not accurate to apply the criticism of charlatanism to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically-based therapies offered by state-registered well-trained responsible practitioners. Suicide rates, self-destructive behaviour and drug-addiction increase year on year, especially among young men, this group having perhaps the biggest struggle of adjustment and sense-making in a rapidly-changing culture. This is a group which finds it very difficult to articulate its problems and has extreme difficulty asking for help (as indeed do immigrants and individuals from ethnic minorities). Help for these groups entails a great deal more than twelve CBT sessions focussing on agrophobia, or learning strategies to cope with depression. It entails a profound engagement with the persons existential being including his unconscious pain and terror. Disparaging the few psychoanalytically-trained practitioners who can do and are prepared to do this work, attitudes of contempt in the public domain towards these deeper explorations and sense-making, risk cutting these individuals off from a vital chance.........as well as reducing the richness of the culture in closing down diversity and complexity.
Different people need different approaches, its "horses for courses".