Routledge Surviving Clinical Psychology: Navigating Personal, Professional and Political Selves on the Journey to Qualification

This vital new book navigates the personal, professional and political selves on the journey to training in clinical psychology. Readers will be able to explore a range of ways to enrich their practice through a focus on identities and differences, relationships and power within organisations, supervisory contexts, therapeutic conventions and community approaches.This book includes a rich exploration of how we make sense of personal experiences as practitioners, including chapters on self-formulation, personal therapy, and using services. Through critical discussion, practice examples, shared accounts and exercises, individuals are invited to reflect on a range of topical issues in clinical psychology. Voices often marginalised within the profession write side-by-side with those more established in the field, offering a unique perspective on the issues faced in navigating clinical training and the profession more broadly. In coming together, the authors of this book explore what clinical psychology can become.Surviving Clinical Psychology invites those early on in their careers to link ‘the political’ to personal and professional development in a way that is creative, critical and values-based, and will be of interest to pre-qualified psychologists and researchers, and those mentoring early-career practitioners. Review "I started my clinical psychology training in 1989 and this book wasn’t written. I qualified in 1992, and this book was still not written. It’s now 2019; this book is now written. Excellent. And what is this book? For me this book is an essential, comprehensive, enlightening, challenging and progressive look at the profession I have loved for thirty years. This isn’t just a book for budding/ in training/ practicing clinical psychologists about what we do but, more importantly, it’s about what we could do and together we can, must and will do. It’s about individual and community, inclusion and collaboration, politics and power, adversity and social justice, the personal and the professional. This book doesn’t tell, its asks. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It offers thinking spaces and reflective activities. I read this book and felt energised and invigorated because it challenged me to look at what I think I know and what I know I do, and ask myself what next, what more? Thirty years melted away and I now feel fresh and eager to rethink, revisit, revise and review. If this book does that for a 52 year old still loving the privilege of working within mental health services but somewhat jaded and frustrated by the ongoing lack of parity with physical health services, the cuts and the unacceptable waiting lists, the impact of adversity (I could go on) - then this book will also invigorate and inspire anyone who cares about mental health: our own and that of the public, communities and the society we serve."Professor Tanya Byron, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, journalist, author, broadcaster, policy advisor"This is the best book I have read about this thing we call clinical psychology. I was pleasantly surprised to find I really enjoyed reading it! The book wrestles with the dilemmas of pursuing a clinical psychology career. Because of its questioning and aspiring approach its relevant for anyone on this career path but its particularly relevant to budding psychologists and those that supervise them. I love the way the book shares many examples of psychologies in action that seek to be creative and liberating. The reflecting points and exercises in the book got me to think more deeply about issues and I intend to use them with my colleagues too. Clinical psychology comes out of a tradition of looking at people as individuals modelled on white middle-class male values and ignoring people's social, political and cultural contexts. The book acknowledges this and looks at how we can keep coming back to the importance of social contexts, to power issues and to the persona