• Question: What's it like being a psychologist?

    Asked by anon-184205 to Tom, sarahhodge, Owen, Nathan, Lorna, Abbie on 4 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Abbie Jordan

      Abbie Jordan answered on 4 Nov 2018:

      Another great question. I think it’s hard to answer broadly as there are so many different types of psychologists and we work in different settings. I am a health psychologist and work in the area of paediatrics so my work looks at how we can help children who experience ongoing pain and their families. Most of my work is research and this takes place at a university. I love working at the university and spending time reading, writing and talking with others who work in my area. We often have skype calls across the world as my reseach ‘area’ is pretty small. I love that! I also really enjoy working with clinical staff at our local hospital as I think that it’s important for me to remember the real life element in my research. So having good links with the clinicians (mostly psychologists) who work in the paediatric pain service is really important to me.

      I also spend time teaching and teach on the Masters in Health Psychology. I enjoy this too and learn a lot from the students.

      Does that help? It’s pretty specific to my situation and I think others will differ in their experiences. I really think that our work can make a difference to children who experience ongoing pain (like pain conditions or arthritis) and their families and that is really important to me.

    • Photo: Nathan Hook

      Nathan Hook answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Many people imagine a ‘psychologist’ as a ‘therapist’, often someone like Sigmund Freud. Psychology is actually far broader than that, and taught as a separate subject to therapy work.

      Some psychologists do work in a medical way. Others do original research to further our understanding of minds, and teach psychology. Many people like me who studied psychology work in data science with statistics, because psychology training includes a lot of statistics (but this is very different to the maths you do in school). Many actually become writers (for example, J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote the Babylon 5 TV series and superhero comics like spider-man and Thor is actually a cognitive psychologist), because understanding the human mind helps you create interesting fictional characters and understand how events might change them. So, there isn’t really such as think as just ‘being a psychologist.’

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