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.

James Randall is a tattooed, vegetarian clinical psychologist working with children and young people within the National Health Service (NHS). He previously represented aspiring psychologists for 4 years as the co-chair of the Pre-Qualification Group within the British Psychological Society.