Psychologist

Hi, I'm Saara and I'm a clinical psychologist at TBI Health.

So, psychology is the study of human behaviour – kind of the why we do what we do – and a clinical psychologist has a specialty expertise within mental health and wellbeing – assessing, understanding and treating mental health issues.

What I do on a day-to-day basis is I work with my clients to help them find the tools that are going to help them overcome the challenges in their lives. They might come to me with all the information about their lives, their expertise on what's helpful for them, and then I'll combine that with all the things I know about psychology and what the research says and then together we can make a plan about what's going to be the most helpful for them.

My role at TBI is to help clients who are having challenges with injury or ongoing pain, to do the things that are important to them despite that. We know when you've got pain or injury and it's going on for a really long time, it starts to take a toll on all these different areas of your life. So often people are coming and talking to me about their sleep being really disrupted, or maybe they're feeling a bit more down, a bit more frustrated. Maybe they're more worried than usual.

And so I work really closely with the clients as well as the other health care practitioners they're seeing, to help ensure that they're going to keep moving forward and get back to living the life that they normally would.

I start work at 8am. So I usually come in and grab a coffee and I'll read through my notes and look at who I'm going to be having sessions with today. Definitely a big chunk of my day is seeing clients and planning for seeing clients. We have to keep notes, so a lot of it is also after sessions, writing up what we've done.

Probably the next biggest piece of my day is talking with other clinicians – the physios that my client might be seeing, or the doctors. When clinicians work really closely together and we're all on the same page, that's when people are more likely to do well and kind of overcome these challenges.

Some people worry that it is really heavy and emotionally draining and that will start to impact them. That's something to be wary of, yes, but as you train and as you do more clinical work, you build up an ability to be able to manage some of the heavy stuff that's coming at you. So you can kind of maintain your own wellbeing.

To become a clinical psychologist you study for about six years. First you do a three years undergraduate degree. So that could be a Bachelor of Arts, or a Bachelor of Science, but you have to do psychology as your major. Then you'll do another three years postgraduate, so part of that's doing some research so you do your Masters. And then you also are doing the stuff I really enjoyed, which was more of the clinical-specific training.

So you do a year kind of learning about all the research that sits behind clinical psychology and then you have two years doing a lot more practical placement, so you're working four days a week – with clients, within a company. Often you might be getting paid as well, which is really good.

It is a lot of study, but all the skills you're building are really transferable. Psychology is the behaviour of people, or the science of people, right? So that knowledge is so useful and no matter what you go on to do.

You register with the New Zealand Psych board every year and a part of registering is that you need to keep up to date with your professional development. What that means is you get to go on trainings and to workshops to kind of make sure you're up to date with everything. So it is cool you get to keep learning.

I'd say there's no one type of person that would be the best fit as a psychologist. Our clients come from different walks of life and so we want our clinical psychologists to come from different walks of life.

I think it is really important to be someone who can put yourself in other people's shoes and really empathise with what's going on for them. Being able to sit and listen to someone and not necessarily jump in really quickly and try to fix it.

People are unique and so you're always working with different people and so your job's always unique. You're always using your brain in different ways, that's a really cool part of the job.

I think my favourite thing is when you're working with someone where you see that they have more hope for the future – they see that things might get better. When someone's been having a really hard time and you've been working with them for a while, seeing that kind of spark, it just feels really good and it's lovely to be able to help people get that.