The Skeleton Cupboard: The Making of a Clinical Psychologist

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A badly wounded woman abused by her boyfriend entered the clinic): A nurse came to deal with the bruises, and then left once her task was over- I knew she wanted to be me, staying in the room with him.

As discussed above, I think the author went a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitle overboard with the "in-the-perspective-of-my-younger-self" thing. The writing was really hard to get through at times. I understand that psychology is not an exact science (I have studied it myself and have friends who are psychologists) - but I think this book has hardly anything to do with how a clinical psychologist is 'made'. The legend in mental health services is that in general a third of those we treat will get ‘better’, a third will stay the same and a third will get worse. We can’t ‘cure’ everyone, and this is not only because some cannot be cured’ – sometimes we just don’t know how to. In fact, the term ‘cure’ sits unhelpfully in any understanding of supporting those with mental health difficulties This book is actually very frustrating. In the introduction the people whose cases are described in the book are revealed to be 'constructs which is just a fancy way of admitting they are 'fictional', as the epilogue describes them.All these questions about the shit end of life, at a time when I should have been unthinkingly hedonistic. At fifteen years old, my frontal lobes were in a post-pubertal stage of reorganization, which meant I should have been taking my own risks and thinking bugger all about the consequences. I am going to start at the beginning and tell the stories of my training as a well-meaning but inexperienced young woman. I had to learn on the job: half the week at University College London, receiving lectures and training in models and approaches in mental health, writing essays, case reports, a dissertation and taking exams; the other half of the week on a series of six-month placements, attempting, with regular supervision, to apply this learning. De verhalen van Imogen, Paul en Harold grepen me naar de keel en op het einde van ieder hoofdstuk dacht ik inderdaad telkens ‘niets is wat het lijkt’. Je zet je personages met heel erg veel respect neer en daar heb ik alleen maar bewondering voor.

The failures were brushed over and blamed on the patient's,"who don't want help", e.g. The pregnant drug user. Personally I would have preferred more of those stories - about why you can't help some people and how frustrating it must be when you can't help or don't know how. A region of the brain that influences higher mental functions often associated with intelligence, such as the ability to foresee the consequences of actions, planning, comprehension and mood. The entire book, I get the uneasy subtle sense that the author is channeling these "inspired" characters to indirectly compliment herself. In the first book the sociopath compliments her amazing blue eyes, her facial structure etc. over and over and over and over again. Then in other scenes people tell her how pretty she looks, could be a model, etc. Even in the case that people did tell her this in real life, I do not see any purpose in her consciously deciding that it was a worthy conversational topic to include into this book other than to praise herself. First, the majority of clinical training that doctoral students receive is not trial by error. The author discusses how she administered an entire neuropsychological battery without ever reviewing the measures with a supervisor. Absurd. I took several classes and was supervised for weeks before giving my own battery. Mistake number three: if you ever feel out of your depth, then find a reason to leave and leave. This is a job, not a calling. If you want to save with self-sacrifice, then find a nunnery.This is the hook of The Skeleton Cupboard, the book I’d promised to review by Professor Tanya Byron, a Chartered Clinical Psychologist of over twenty years who specialised in children and adolescents. She has published many books, done relevant TV and radio segments, and conducted the well known Byron Review: Safer children in a digital world in 2008, with a follow up in 2010. This book is her recorded experience of being on the clinical psychology doctorate training program. He was supported by his wife, Saira, also Jewish, a survivor of Mathausen concentration camp (her three sisters had been killed in front of her) and she had her own issues including infertility, camp doctors having experimented on her body. In her latter years, more advanced than her husband in dementia, she couldn't be showered, she had to be bathed with a sponge by her husband, she thought the showers were the deadly gas of the Nazi execution chambers, and to help him she would put a damp cloth over his nose and mouth.

I also did not mention that random girl's night scene where they try out different outfits on her for the funeral she was attending. Was the point of the scene to show how valuable her friendship support was and reflect on how she impacts other's lives because she talked to them to face death and plan out their own funerals, just as the gay people did in her attachment? Mistake number one: they don’t have to cry in the first session for you to be doing your job well. Leave that to the counsellors. She is a good writer, and the stories she tells are exciting, challenging and thought-provoking. This is a very enjoyable book to read. If Tanya Byron felt like a change of career, then writing fiction is well within her compass. Alzheimer's is always heart-breaking, but the poor man, Harold, described in this book, is more so than anything I have ever read. Because Alzheimer's leaves old memories intact, a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp is doomed to relive his time there, the present having left him. He was a German Jew who after the war became a famous scientist in London who suffered terribly from PTSD and couldn't stand in line or bear uniforms. The book itself is an easy read. It is also very readable. It did concern me that I found the writing style to be immature - but it seems the author was trying to write as her '22 year old' self. A bit uncomfortable.

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Ondanks dat het misschien niet altijd gemakkelijk voor me was om dit boek te lezen kan ik toch zeggen dat ik content ben met het feit dat ik het boek gelezen heb. Het heeft me weer een inzicht gegeven op verschillende vlakken. Bijvoorbeeld hoe confronterend de opleiding tot klinisch psycholoog kan zijn, wat het doet met degene die de opleiding volgt maar ook hoe patiënten geholpen kunnen worden als de juiste klik er is of juist niet als die mist. Tenslotte is iedereen mens maar zijn de hulpvragen divers net als de uitkomsten. There are some striking omissions. Given this is about her three years of clinical psychology training, we hear nothing of the training course itself, her fellow trainees, the academic programme, the different tutors she met, and only passing asides to the relentless demands of the course, such as the final-year dissertation, course essays, case presentations and exams. From this book you would think that the only important training took place on clinical placements. Perhaps that is the message. But I cannot believe that the bright young Tanya was not also caught up in the many other aspects of training. There is much to recommend The Skeleton Cupboard– a snappy and easy read, neither patronising nor boring; a realistic depiction of clinical training that manages expectations while giving a glance into the professional future many of us desire and yet still proves to be intriguing for those who want a read just to pass the time. It is not a memoir but truthful and will teach you about mental health difficulties- symptoms and therapies– and the clinical and academic hurdles of training. Beyond this it also teaches you about human interaction and how you may fit into that equation in a mental health practitioner role. Overall, this book echoes the sentiment that no one is born a ready made clinical psychologist but anyone could have the potential to become one.

At first I hate the narrator because she expect the impossible: cure and help all her patient but then I realized if I were in her position, I probably thinking the same way. Nothing has changed. We don’t like mental illness – we don’t want it in ourselves because it frightens us, and we have no time or desire to really engage with it in others except as something to gawp at and to define ourselves against. We expect people to be mentally ill in ways that we can accept – ways that are comfortable for us – or we Tijdens het lezen van de inleiding merk ik gelijk hoe gemakkelijk de schrijfstijl leest. Zoals naar mijn mening terecht op de achterzijde in een quote vermeld staat leest de gehele tekst als een roman. De bewoording komt absoluut niet hoogdravend over, zelfs de vaktermen van klinische psychologie zijn dusdanig beperkt en worden soms als ze wel voorkomen in de tekst verklaard. Dit spreekt in positieve vorm voor de schrijfster, laat haar persoonlijkheid zien, haar wil om haar beleving volledig over te brengen en je voelt haar betrokkenheid bij de zaken in het boek. Met een pure oprechtheid voor haar patiënten en ook met kritische blik naar haar eigen kunnen heeft ze met respect een bijzonder goed boek geschreven. The narrative of The Skeleton Cupboard combines Tanya Byron's experience of clinical training with her personal and professional development. If you think you can only do this job by having a perfectly rounded acceptance of all the shit in your life and also a complete understanding of the pain of your patients before you can help them with theirs, then dream on

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Ik heb bewondering voor je. Voor je job als psychologe, je schrijftalent en je doorzettingsvermogen. Wat.een.job. In je inleiding zet je alvast de toon, wat een heftige gebeurtenis en eye-opener is dit? Diep intriest trouwens dat hierbij ook al meteen onrechtvaardigheid aan de oppervlakte komt, een draad die je wel ergens kan doortrekken in je verhaal den ik. Sommige mensen hebben het nu eenmaal moeilijker dan andere. Skeleton in the Closet (1965 film) (also known as Secrets Behind the Wall), a Japanese film by Kōji Wakamatsu I first became fascinated by the frontal lobes of the human brain when I saw my grandmother’s sprayed across the skirting board of her dark and cluttered house. I was fifteen. Byron also drops the curtain off her supervisor, who we tend to forget have troubling lives of their own which may cause them to perform vanishing acts or behave unpredictably. They’re conducting a balancing act of responsibilities where an overly anxious trainee is not the highest priority. Keeping in mind that Byron’s tempestuous relationship with her supervisor was her own subjective experience, and at times seemed odd in writing within the context of the descriptions of her placements and the stories she was relaying, I still learnt a lot about this academic dynamic, whether that was Byron’s intention or not. These two old people supported each other to the end. She died in her husband's arms, by then he had retreated entirely into himself, into the hell of a never-ending concentration camp.