The Skeleton Cupboard: The Making of a Clinical Psychologist

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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. 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 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. When Rosie was helping the author out with her diagnostic assessment and Rosie was saying something, the sentence starts like this:

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 I really didn't warm to our narrator. She was whiny, childish and arrogant. Was she writing in the voice or a 21-25 year old or what? Honestly, I don't care - I just found her a right pain. Condescending about nurses and downright weird when it came to descriptions of her three girls, "The Lovely Rosie" must have been mentioned four or five times. The patient, fashion designer Tom had to spell it out - "we are not friends". 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. 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.I am not saying the author is a lying pants on fire, but the sheer chances of her spotting them in the gay bar she was in, alone, without her friends and she still chose to stay on, kissing, is kinda sus.

Third, the author often uses language that I feel minimizes the severity of mental health issues. She talks lightly about teens competing to be the best anorexic. She describes, on several occasions, severe physical intimate partner violence as " When I have a stronger stomach I would like to finish this, not for the tragic stories but for the way the system works and Most Importantly an insight and understanding into a world that is pushed under the covers. He was charming. In the chaos of the early morning walk-in clinic he was clearly “the man”, the alpha male. the receptionist loved him, there nurses loved him, and so did I-we were his pride. Being a competitive kind of gal I decided that I would be number one lioness. Finally, she glosses over the fact that her supervisor offered to complete her dissertation statistics for her, a project that often takes students years of hard work to complete. While clinical psychology students do receive much training as clinicians, there is also an emphasis on research, often with the purpose of ensuring that interventions are informed by science.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 What follows is the book's introduction, reproduced here with kind permission of the publishers and author. 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. There she lay, refusing to die, until she choked on her blood. The woman who had beaten her was sentenced to only three years for manslaughter with diminished responsibility. She had her baby in prison and was out within eighteen months.