First and foremost, shout out to the JAM JcRew for the most awesome birthday surprise EVER! :o) Totally caught me off guard, and as you can see from the pic, I was extremely happy! Go team!
Moving forth to the extremely dense readings this week...
Looking at Smith's article, "The end of theoretical orientations?", really makes me wonder whether or not I have entered into an archaic profession resistant to change. I think most people can reasonably agree that therapy, whether it be physical, psychological, or medical, truly benefits the patient if done correctly. In our field, however, we spend so much time worrying about who created the concept of our theory, or which trendy wave we entered into graduate school on, but are they necessary to complete the treatment of our patient, which is arguably the top priority.
In looking at other fields, do we really require them to highlight a certain technique with their treatment? Certainly, there are specialties within other fields - we need to know which portion of our body needs healing, so we go to an expert who can assist us with that. However, when we want our mind healed, there is a sudden shift to which way the professional is going to treat us. Now here's the conundrum: no two people have the same exact pathologies (as studied earlier with diagnostic categorization arguments), so should WE use one school of thought on THEM? Shouldn't the client dictate what type of practice we run?
The shift towards eclecticism accounts for this new way of thinking. I'll give the old geezers the benefit of the doubt - afterall, we are one of the newer sciences. But after a while, don't you think someone should have recognized that the round ball doesn't always fit inside of the square peg? One size does not fit all, so we should not think that one therapy would fit our increasingly more complex client need. (Tangentially, the concept of studying in graduate school under a certain school of thought [which would dictate where you wanted to study], coupled with the search for the perfect advisor relationship is just too much for an applicant to handle - we need to do away with such strain in the Ph.D. quest! Geesh!)
In essence, realizing that our main goal is to "create more smiles in the world" will guide us towards being better clinicians. Learning how to treat various symptoms as they are presented as well as being instructed in various methods of psychological theory will lend to more satisfied consumers and healthier minds.
I think you might really like the Sechrest and Smith, 1994 article that was optional reading for this week. They argue that Clinical Psychology should be the practice of psychology, which seems goofily obvious at first, until you realize they mean forgetting all the various schools of thought (the big theories) and, instead, implementing the various things we know from social, cognitive, developmental, etc.
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