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MahatmaBuddah t1_j85t0p0 wrote

Reply to comment by Commercial-Life-9998 in Training does not improve clinical psychology students’ mentalization abilities, study finds by lolfuys

Very true! As a clinical child psychologist, I’ve often said 75% of my skill and ability to be helpful is who I was before I went to grad school and learned the theories and techniques of psychotherapy. Who I was, as a mature, patient, nonjudgmental, not make assumptions, kind of person. Grad school and training taught me how to Iisten better, tho, that’s for sure.

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Neurotic_Bakeder t1_j86u4lx wrote

This is mostly just a bad headline imo. The way they measured "training" was 1st versus 4th year psychology students.

However, my psych undergrad focused on psych research and literature, not counselling skills.

The article concludes saying that this study highlights the need for specific training around perspective taking and empathy for counselors, rather than hoping you just suddenly develop mentalization skills after reading 300 articles on abnormal psych or whatever. Don't get me wrong, I can read about rats pulling levers all day long, but I don't expect that to make me any better at helping a client breathe through a panic attack.

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ignigenaquintus t1_j87w52i wrote

If empathy is the key here, then we have a problem. We know due the literature of in-group bias that both men and women have more empathy for women, and the number of male psychologists have been reduced from 38% to 28% in the last decade, with male psychologists under 30 being only 5% of psychologists under 30.

We also know that there are between 15-20+ liberals per non liberal working in psychology, and that ideas like privilege and systemic discrimination reduce the empathy toward men.

Seems to me this could easily translate in a situation where the people that are going to need more help in the following decades are the ones that may be receiving less empathy and therefore less effective help.

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