Anyone trained as a child therapist or psychologist?

[Pigwidgeon99]

Been in education 25 years and planning a career move. I'm in a pastoral role at the moment, rather than a teaching role (though have done both) and enjoy it immensely but pay is crap and don't feel I'm able to do as much as I'd like.

Considering doing further study but finding it difficult to know what path to take. Financially and time-wise, doing a full blown doctorate feels like too much of an undertaking and I'm not even sure I'm academically up to it - I'm 45 and feel like I've lost half my brain cells since I did my degree!

I've got a first class undergraduate degree in psychology and would ideally like to do a masters part time but despite having done a lot of reading around I am not convinced it would actually qualify me to do anything. It would give me a lot of useful knowledge but for the expense I'd like it if I could move into a therapist role.

Anyone in the field have any advice for me?

I think the best starting point is thinking about where you want to take your practice. Do you want to keep working in schools? Set up a private practice? How about working for the NHS? It also depends on whether you want to be a psychologist or a psychotherapist as those roles are quite different.

You’re right that with a background in psychology you could apply for a clinical psychology doctorate. Have you looked at what is needed to apply for those? Most clinical psychology doctorates require a minimum of 2 years experience in a mental health related field, but I would imagine that your current role meets those requirements. An alternative would be to apply for an assistant psychologist/clinical associate role in the NHS. There’s currently a huge movement to increase the number of psychological roles in the NHS and so lots of funding is available. This is worth looking at more in depth. https://www.hee.nhs.uk/our-work/mental-health/new-roles-mental-health/psychological-professions-roles

To train as a psychotherapist you would need to train either through the BACP, UKCP or BABCP. Psychotherapy tends to be more “person centered” than psychology and less about “how the brain works” iyswim. There are lots of different modalities and you would have to research which one suits your way of working/thinking.

This is completely left field, but have you thought about mental health nursing? Lots of CBT therapists/mental health practitioners/psychotherapists start out as MH nurses whose extra training has been supported or subsidised by the NHS. There’s also guaranteed work at the end (literally, MH nursing is one of the few courses with 100% course specific employment) unlike independent psychotherapy/counselling, without being as competitive as psychology. You would have to be ok with blood/needles/clinical skills though, even if you only do those things during training.

I hope this is vaguely helpful. I feel like I’ve just thrown lots of stuff out there. This topic is potentially huge but at least this might be a starting point 🙂