Hi I'm Saara and I'm a Clinical Psychologist at TBI Health.
So psychology is the study of human behaviour.
Kind of the why we do what we do
and a clinical psychologist has a specialty expertise
within mental health and wellbeing.
Assessing, understanding and treating mental health issues.
What I do on a day-to-day basis is I work with
my clients to help them find the tools that are going to
help them overcome the challenges in their lives.
They might come to me with all the information about their lives,
their expertise on what's helpful for them and then
i'll combine that with all the things I know about psychology
and what the research says and then together we can make a plan
about what's going to be the most helpful for them.
My role at TBI is to help clients who are having challenges
with injury or ongoing pain, to do the things
that are important to them despite that.
We know when you've got pain or injury
and it's going on for a really long time,
it starts to take a toll on all these different areas of your life,
so often people coming and talking to me about
their sleep being really disrupted or maybe, you know
they're feeling a bit more down a bit more frustrated,
maybe they're more worried than usual
and so I work really closely with the clients
as well as the other healthcare practitioners they're seeing,
to help ensure that they're going to keep moving forward
and get back to living the life that they normally would.
I start work at eight AM.
So I usually come in and grab a coffee
and i'll read through my notes and look at
who i'm going to be having sessions with today.
Definitely a big chunk of my day is seeing clients
and planning for seeing clients.
We have to keep notes, so a lot of it is also after sessions,
writing up what we've done.
Probably the next biggest piece of my day
is talking with other clinicians.
The physio's that my client might be seeing or the doctors.
When clinicians work really closely together
and we're all on the same page that's when people
are more likely to do well and kind of overcome these challenges.
Some people worry that it's really heavy
and emotionally draining and that
that will start to impact them.
That's something to be wary of, yes,
but as you train and as you do more clinical work,
you build up an ability to be able to manage
some of the heavy stuff that's coming at you.
So you can kind of maintain your own well-being.
To become a Clinical Psychologist you study for about six years.
First you do three years undergraduate degree.
So that could be a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science
but you have to do Psychology as your major.
Then you'll do another three years post-graduate
so part of that's doing some research.
So you do your master's and then you
also are doing the stuff i really enjoyed
which was more of the clinical specific training.
So you do a year kind of learning about
all the research that sits behind clinical psychology
and then you have two years doing a little more practical placement
so you're working four days a week, with clients,
within a company, often you might be getting paid as well,
which is really good.
It is a lot of study but all the skills you're building
are really transferable.
Psychology is the behaviour of people
or the science of people, right?
so that knowledge is so useful and no matter what
you go on to do.
You register with the New Zealand Psych board every year
and a part of registering is that you need to keep up to date
with your professional development.
What that means is you get to go on trainings
and to workshops to kind of make sure
you're up to date with everything, so it is cool.
You get to keep learning.
I'd say there's no one type of person that would be
the best fit as a Psychologist.
Our clients come from different walks of life
and so we want our Clinical Psychologists
to come from different walks of life.
I think it is really important to be someone
who can put yourselves in other people's shoes
and really empathise with what's going on for them.
Being able to sit and listen to someone
and not necessarily jump in really quickly and try to fix it.
(Yeah so frustrated)
People are unique and so you're always working with different
people and so your job's always unique.
You're always using your brain in different ways,
that's a really cool part of the job.
I think my favourite thing is when you're working with someone
where you see that they have more hope for the future.
They see that things might get better.
When someone's been having a really hard time
and you've been working with them for a while,
seeing that kind of spark, it just feels really good
and it's lovely to be able to help people get that.