The Skeleton Cupboard: The Making of a Clinical Psychologist

Product Information

Although I have written books about child development and parenting, I have never felt able, until now, to write more fully about the experiences of working in mental health. It’s taken this long to distil the experience of working with some of the most amazing people I have ever known – people who trusted me enough to tell me about their lives. Finally, she glosses over the fact that her supervisor offered to complete her dissertation statistics for her, a project that often takes students years of hard work to complete. While clinical psychology students do receive much training as clinicians, there is also an emphasis on research, often with the purpose of ensuring that interventions are informed by science. As cringe as this was to read, I still do not understand her decision to include her personal love/sex/lust life into a book that was for readers with an interest in clinical psychology, its occupation and patients. I have no interest in her lust life. While she did disclose in the epilogue that she wanted to infuse her own thoughts, life and struggles that evolve together with her patients, I had no interest in her drooling over the "alpha male". With that being said, I can relate to her young arrogant self about being convinced that she was special and different from everyone else, or craving for his attention. With that being said, did she HAVE to use the word "lioness" to describe herself? And "gal"?? maybe its an 80s thing.) It was a wild place a place of heavenly debauchery. Beautiful men wanting beautiful men and beautiful women watching those excellently sexy girls who wanted something more than the sexy boys. There are some striking omissions. Given this is about her three years of clinical psychology training, we hear nothing of the training course itself, her fellow trainees, the academic programme, the different tutors she met, and only passing asides to the relentless demands of the course, such as the final-year dissertation, course essays, case presentations and exams. From this book you would think that the only important training took place on clinical placements. Perhaps that is the message. But I cannot believe that the bright young Tanya was not also caught up in the many other aspects of training.

OK, to be honest, I am not entirely sure that my grandmother’s brains were on the skirting board when I went into her house that day at the age of fifteen. Is that a direct memory or something I told myself later on? In fact, I’m not sure I remember much of that day at all except two things: a massive bloodstain on the carpet and my father making a noise like an animal caught in a trap. This book is actually very frustrating. In the introduction the people whose cases are described in the book are revealed to be 'constructs which is just a fancy way of admitting they are 'fictional', as the epilogue describes them.She’s meant to be a psychologist. And okay, at that time, there’s some leeway: trans people weren’t as well-accepted and understood, and she was just beginning her career as a psychologist. But she didn’t write the book at the beginning of her career, although goodness knows the naivete sometimes makes it seem like it. She should’ve known better. If you think you can only do this job by having a perfectly rounded acceptance of all the shit in your life and also a complete understanding of the pain of your patients before you can help them with theirs, then dream on I gobbled up this book - very easy to read. The chapters could be read as stand alone or sequentially. I would recommend it to others as it is both informative and thought provoking.

Asphyxiation: that was the problem, of course. If only she’d died instantly from the head trauma, the crime would have been treated as murder. If only she hadn’t been a stubborn, wilful woman – a woman who had fled Nazi Germany pregnant with my father, a woman who had lost many of her family in concentration camps, a woman who never took anything lying down, except when she was beaten with an iron fire poker. A young woman – eight months pregnant, I discovered much later, and a heroin addict – had battered her about the head with an iron fire poker. She was an ex-tenant of my grandmother’s. Th is woman knew that her former landlady, a German Jewish refugee recently converted to Christianity, had treasures and cash galore stashed among the chaos of her large house, the top two floors of which she rented out.In the epilogue, the author talks about how she intentionally wrote the book in a younger, arrogant and naive version of her. Fair enough. But as a 24 (I really forgot and cannot be bothered to remember her age) year old master's student doing her dissertation, I highly doubt that her cognitive process and vocabulary was that of a 14 year old. Here are just a few examples of her weird narration: These two old people supported each other to the end. She died in her husband's arms, by then he had retreated entirely into himself, into the hell of a never-ending concentration camp.

Tanya Byron is a clinical psychologist and a professor in the public understanding of science, specializing in working with children and adolescents, with twenty-five years' experience. Tanya has authored an independent government review and advises governments nationally and internationally. She writes regular columns for The Times and Good Housekeeping and is a broadcaster for BBC television and Radio 4. www.professortanyabyron.com

Popular Posts

Byron also drops the curtain off her supervisor, who we tend to forget have troubling lives of their own which may cause them to perform vanishing acts or behave unpredictably. They’re conducting a balancing act of responsibilities where an overly anxious trainee is not the highest priority. Keeping in mind that Byron’s tempestuous relationship with her supervisor was her own subjective experience, and at times seemed odd in writing within the context of the descriptions of her placements and the stories she was relaying, I still learnt a lot about this academic dynamic, whether that was Byron’s intention or not. in my final year of training when I was beginning to get more of an understanding of my professional identity and approach, people in crisis are manifesting much more than the sum of their own illness. Their problems are symbolic of an overall system – usually a family – in crisis The Skeleton in the Closet - A Halloween Tradition, 2013 Children's book by Chad Shea, illustrated by Danielle Beu of The Beu Sisters

She is a good writer, and the stories she tells are exciting, challenging and thought-provoking. This is a very enjoyable book to read. If Tanya Byron felt like a change of career, then writing fiction is well within her compass. Although this is a Non-Fiction book, the stories are not real. The 'case studies' are just amalgamated examples of problems people face. You've got your token dementia / anorexia / drug addicts / sexual dysfunction etc. I find this whole thing absurd, actually. I am going to start at the beginning and tell the stories of my training as a well-meaning but inexperienced young woman. I had to learn on the job: half the week at University College London, receiving lectures and training in models and approaches in mental health, writing essays, case reports, a dissertation and taking exams; the other half of the week on a series of six-month placements, attempting, with regular supervision, to apply this learning.

Legal

In that moment I became the rational coper. My darling father howled, but I just shut down and began to try and understand how and why. The narrative of The Skeleton Cupboard combines Tanya Byron's experience of clinical training with her personal and professional development.