Being a Clinician : What Does It Means?

After I had my case presentation last week, I still have numbers of questions in my head. My lecturer said that one important point that differ Clinicians and Educational Psychologist is the ability to read beyond the number written in the paper, such as: IQ score, mental age or any other scale used in psychological measurements. She critized numbers of cases presented last week, because for her what we did was not enough for a Clinician-t0-be. I started to reflect her advice to myself…

Being a clinician is one of my dreams since long time ago. I always want to help other people by understand their feelings, their backgrounds, their actions and the outcomes. I want to help them with scientific knowledge, not just based on my perceptions, or even worse, my intuition.

Whenever I listen to other people about their problems, my mind is wandering around. It is like travelling through the time and space, just to get the clear picture of what had happened with that person and what it was like for that person. I imagine that I am watching a movie and listening to the narration, while the person tells the story, so that I could understand the case and get the whole picture of it.

In order to understand a case, we need to read beyond the spoken words, beyond the thinkable possibilities or the seen phenomena. It’s not about becoming a mind reader or a witch doctor, but it is a way to connect the missing puzzles and bring them all into consciousness as a complete picture (do I sound Freudian?). Sometimes the person just don’t get the correct understanding of the relations among scenes or events in his life. Therefore, we have to help them to connect the missing puzzles. And after that, we can work together with that person to move on to the next step and understand that the past may affect present life and should not affect future life.

I think, personally, being a clinician means that we have to help others with the knowledge that we have. It’s not merely about the money, but it is also about developing ourselves, myself, to understand other people better than before and learn the life lesson given from certain case.

Way to go, Clinicians!