People commonly get confused by these two terms: clinical psychology and psychiatry. While these two fields may have something in common, it is important that people know what type of professional they should seek help from whenever they have a psychological condition to deal with. Clinical psychology is a branch of psychology that deals with the scientific and clinical practice of psychology. For those who do not yet have a clear idea what psychology is, it is simply a branch of science concerned with the study of a human’s mind, how it functions and on a larger scale, how an individual’s mind affects his behaviors, reactions to different stimuli, and how he interacts with the different elements of environment. It is a much larger umbrella compared to Clinical Psychology.
Now it is time to differentiate clinical psychology from psychiatry. Psychiatry is a field that focuses on the utilization of drugs and a wide variety of medications to treat a psychological disorder or to simply cure a disease that possibly affects a client’s psychological functions. Therefore, an individual could assume that a psychiatrist is a medical doctor who would most likely resort to the use of medication-based solutions whenever he treats a patient (Green. 2003).
Clinical psychology on the other hand is a subcategory of psychology that deals with the use of different assessment tools to assess a client’s condition as well as the use of different therapies to treat a psychological disorder. Therefore, an individual without any background in psychology should be able to easily distinguish a psychologist from a psychiatrist simply by observing the focus of the treatment. People could easily do this even when the treatment has not started yet because usually, before a psychological treatment commences, the medical professional concerned explains to the patient the next procedures, whether it is an assessment or a therapeutic procedure, that he has to first.
Clinical psychologists are often subjected to more complicated psychological cases such as controlled substance abuse, suicidal behaviors, depression (there are many kinds of depression and even extreme cases of insomnia). This is because they somewhat specialize on rehabilitation. Their rehab treatments have to have short & long term goals, and the timeframe required for them to see some improvements on the client’s condition could take a few months up a to several years. It is also a part of the job of a clinical psychologist to administer assessment procedures and help the patient adhere to the administered treatment plans. His work as a medical professional indeed covers a lot of tasks.
Overview of Social Psychology
There are many branches of psychology, the study of the human brain and behavior. And since it is such a complex and at the same time a very large topic to generalize and discuss as a whole, it was cut off to several branches. One of the most important branches of psychology is social psychology.
A Psychologist (in general) usually diagnoses a client’s psychological condition and mental state by asking several critically designed questions. And a psychologist specializing on a particular field such as social psychology may ask a different set of questions compared to a psychologist specializing in another field.
The questions that a social psychologist often asks to a client focus on the client’s perception of himself in relation to the world or society that he lives in and vice versa. Questions that aims to determine how the client feels and reacts based on the opinion of others could also be included. Since these are all open-ended questions (questions that cannot be answered by just a simple yes or no), the social psychologist will be able to learn a lot of vital things about his present client’s condition.
According to Gordon Allport (1955), a psychologists who specialized in human personalities, “social psychology is a discipline that uses scientific methods to understand and explain how the though, feeling and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings”. Therefore, the way how psychology was defined a while ago through the questions that social psychologists ask their clients perfectly describes the subject.
Social psychologists believe that everything that a person can see and does to his environment and vice versa contributes to the way how he behaves and acts as a person. Social psychology usually deals with these different factors in assessing their client: Friends and acquaintances of their client, the world and the client himself. If an individual with a psychological disorder is going to seek medical care from social psychologists, these are the factors that he will focus more on. Some of the most common concepts and principles that we could learn by digging in deeper into this discipline will say that people construct their own reality because of the sheer strength of social intuitions, and that any individual’s behavior could have been affected by social influences, personal attitudes and dispositions.
Developmental Psychology
Just like social psychology, developmental psychology is just another discipline that lies under the bigger branch of psychology. In this area of psychology, changes and time are equally important. This is because what developmental psychologists usually monitor are the changes that occur over a period of time. That’s why it has the “developmental” part in its name in the first place.
Developmental psychologists often deal with kids regardless whether they have a psychological disorder or not. In developmental psychology, as the name implies, the focus is always towards the development of the clients. The developmental psychologist must have a very keen sense of observation so that she will be able to spot any changes in the development pattern of a child immediately (Skinner, 1974).
In reality, there are two ways how a developmental psychologist may observe his client: accurately or inaccurately. But one thing that should be noted here is the fact that when developmental psychologist fails to diagnose and observe a child correctly, it is only either he does not have the right skill or experience to spot key development patterns or he simply lacks the diligence to do so. More often than not, it’s in the diligence part where most developmental psychologists fail.
Language, attention retention, and behavioral patterns can collectively be considered just the tip of an iceberg when it comes to the things that developmental psychologists have to observe and analyze. Most factors that developmental psychologists should seek out have to be as objective as possible. Even though subjective findings could also contribute to the quality of their assessment, it’s still the objective data that these people should be more concerned at.
A good example of objective findings that a developmental psychologist may observe is a child’s behavior with regards to the idea of sharing. Behavior in general may seem to be a purely subjective variable. There are ways to extract objective findings from a child’s behavior and one way is to check for manifestations of a certain behavior. If the psychologist just saw on the spot that their subject shared his or her toy to another child, then that could be considered a very objective (something that they could see) finding that they could put in their records. Such behavior clearly showed the existence of such behavior and how the child recognizes that he has to share something, in this case a toy, to his playmate. Sometimes, developmental psychology may come hand in hand with social psychology since both are concerned with the way how society affects an individual’s behavior. Perhaps, the only difference is that developmental psychology focuses more on the changes taking place over time.
Neuropsychological Psychology
There are many bizarre and complex branches of psychology. One of the most complex branches of psychology is Neuropsychological Psychology. One can sense simply by reading the name of the discipline out loud that it is like a convergence or overlapping of three separate fields: neurology, psychology and psychology. A neuropsychologist is someone who has a doctoral degree in Psychology degree and at the same time specializes in the overall aspects of the brain. Some of the main areas of focus in this discipline are the general function of the brain (can be correlated with physiology), the underlying brain processes that may affect a person’s behaviors and most importantly, brain-behavior relationships. This medical professional could also be relied on in cases where abnormalities in a person’s emotional and mental functions are present. Although Neuropsychological Psychology is still under the bigger umbrella of psychology which is most likely only concerned with a person’s behavior, a Neuropsychological Psychologist is also capable of diagnosing and treating a client with a brain injury or disease or a client whose brain is in an abnormal anatomical or physiological state (Moore, 1968).
An effective neuropsychological psychologist should be good in performing neuropsychological evaluation procedures. In this process, all that the psychologist has to do is to check if the brain is functioning well especially when it performs its most basic and complex functions. This is done by conducting different tests and diagnostic procedures. Should the client show any symptoms of a possibly underlying disease or otherwise, it is the duty of the neuropsychological psychologist to record and keep track of those findings.
Being assessed by a neuropsychological psychologist is widely considered as an important part of any rehabilitative treatment. The rehabilitation team (a medical team whose members came from different allied medical fields). If the rehabilitation team could get a big and accurate picture about the client’s brain condition, the whole team would not have to do perform and repeat unnecessary tests just to rule out the presence of other diseases. There are a lot of conditions where the function of the brain could be compromised and these are the cases where the skills of an effective neuropsychological psychologist could be well-utilized. Acquired brain injuries that are usually due to trauma and more specific disorders such as Spina Bifida and Cerebral Palsy are some examples of conditions that could easily be ruled out or diagnosed by a neuropsychological psychologist.
Cognitive Psychology
Ever heard of the word “cognitive”? Well if yes, then that’s good, but if not, you only have to remember that whenever such word comes out, it is important to know that it always has something to do with the brain and its function: to store memories and to do a lot of incredible things. Cognitive psychology deals with these kinds of things; how the brain functions, how it enables an individual to retain his attention, how he focuses on the things in his surrounding, how he solves a problem and basically every or any process that has something to do with the brain. The brain is an incredibly fantastic thing that psychologists have to further classify the brain structures and how it works into categories and subcategories.
Unlike in any other psychological discipline, Cognitive psychology most focused on the mental events, more than just the processes, which happen inside the brain. Cognitive psychologists believe that studying the brain could become a never-ending process because each and every person’s brain could be completely unique from other people and because up to this date, there are still a lot of undiscovered mental events that continuously happen inside almost every people’s brain (Seligman, 1967). A good example for this is the mechanism of formulating dreams. Cognitive psychologists have always been fascinated by the way how people strongly generate thoughts even though their body is physically at rest. They have tried different ways to study and learn more things about dreams only to find out that they cannot literally dissect and study an individual’s brain while he is dreaming. On the other hand, there are a lot of developments and improvements in the field of neurological technology these days that formerly impossible things could already be made possible. That way, the different events and structures of the mind could be more easily explored.
Some psychologists admit that Cognitive psychology was developed as a response to behaviorism. It was developed for the community of psychologists so that they can avoid confusions when it comes to using the correct methods in assessing or in treating their clients ; because back in the early days of psychology, there used to be a lot of variations with the ways how psychologist treat psychological disorders and alike. And so Cognitive psychology was developed. Cognitive psychology was also developed to prove to psychologists who practice different disciplines that the mind could still be studied even if obvious and decipherable behavioral patterns are not present.
Works Cited
Allport, G. (1955). Becoming: Basic Considerationf for a Psychology of Personality. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Green, C. (2003). Early psychological though. Praeger.
Moore, B. (1968). Psychoanalytic terms and concepts. Amer Psychoanalytic Assn.
Skinner, B. (1974). About Behaviorism. New Yoirk: Random House.
Seligman, M. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of experimental Psychology.
