True, only medically qualified Doctors can become Psychiatrists.


It depends on which area of Psychology you're talking about.

The parts that aren't predicated on medical science. They're my favourite

I got a different job, put simply. I was working in a psychology department and a better job came up doing something else and I basically never went back..


My other half is a counseller and she does have to do various vocational qualifications to get work in the sector she's interested in but she's not medically trained, nor does she have a psychology qualification (you should hear the things she says about the psychologists she has to work with ). But you can still effectively set up as a freelance without qualifications and it's up to the people coming to you to decide whether you're up to it or not. It's not like being a doctor where claiming to be one when you're not qualified as one will actually get you in trouble. To quote the BPS web site 'There are no legal minimum qualifications necessary to practise as a counsellor in the UK'.

As to psychiatry, when I was doing my final year and I was considering careers, it was definitely the case that if you wanted to work in psychiatry (specifically) you needed to do as much medical training again as the psychology degree. I'm not sure if it's an either/or thing i.e. you could do a medical degree and then postgraduate psychology or a psychology degree and postgraduate medical and they counted the same.

The BPS has got on top of this stuff in recent years though and there's now a concept of a chartered psychologist in various fields. Basically you have to do a degree and some relevant work in the field to get 'chartered' status and claiming to be chartered when you're not is fraud. Same as with engineering and etc.

Psychology is very broad church, there's tons of it that never gets within a mile of a hospital or white gown. Obvious link. I was doing a lot of stuff in occupational psych before i hopped paths..

Jon

What do you do now?

I'd love to hear what Mrs John has to say about psychologists! I imagine it's delightfully complimentary

True, you have to be BPS registered to get Chartered status but still, stupidly, anyone can legally set themselves up and call themselves a 'Psychologist'.


Nowadays they're heavily promoting CBT, primarily as it's one of the cheaper therapies as they're training up non-psychologists to practice it.

I think they're more concerned with cost cutting than whether it's actually relevant or not TBH. The stories I hear about the pieces Psychologists have to pick up after people have first been given "therapy" by people who just aren't qualified enough to be dealing with it are quite shocking. Moreso because those dishing out the "advice" actually believe they're doing a good job.

Had some of that. I thought it was rather good. But the guy doing it was well trained AND naturally gifted IMHO. I dislike a purely "science" based approach to anything though.



Isn't everybody? Depressing really.

Oh yes, it can be really good for some people, it's just not appropriate for every case though.

IT, basically. The job I got after the psychology department was about ergonomics and GUI design and I've got further and further away from psychology over time.


. I think it wouldn't be wise for me to introduce her to X404, especially not with the Rachel Riley thread and all..

Jon

Interesting most of the UI people at Nomensa are psychologists. http://www.nomensa.com

Shame.

But entirely understandable.

I'm intrigued that IT would even begin to interest you. Interesting.

There's a whole branch of Psychology that deals with how people interact with technology.

Oh right. Next to people, I find technology inanely boring. Does this branch have a name?

Human Interface Device?

When I started it was called 'Human Computer Interaction' or HCI for short. Basically it's a mix of 'hard science' stuff like ergonomics and design - stuff where you can prove empirically that doing something like this rather than like that is better or faster - and the more airy-fairy stuff about what people like or don't like. Even before I did psychology I was interested in tech and my degree paper was a design for computer-administered psychological testing systems that were a bit easier for people who would struggle with standard computer tests. It was basically about AI - which is another area where computers and psychology meet. The computer would monitor the way the person answered the early test questions and tailor it's way of asking questions (and indeed the questions it asked) to make it less stressful for the user to take the test - one of the issues with psych tests is people who are under stress don't give useful answers, which is incidentally why anyone who gives people applying for a job a psych test just before the interview is a complete idiot .

Nowadays of course hardly anybody is freaked out by computers any more, so it's much more about designing interfaces that are optimised and intuitive and occasionally finding new ways to do the thing as a whole. The problem is whenever you come up with a new way of getting people to interact with technology, you find some scifi writer mentioned it 50 years ago anyway...

Jon

im covering this in a unit for my foundation degree at the moment sounds like it hasnt changed much, we are covering very similar topics