oct ewj 24 online - Flipbook - Page 56
Why you might need
a Psychological Report
by Peter Gray
A clinical psychologist is trained to understand the
impact that the world has on us, how it conditions our
minds through experience and then how subsequent
experiences feed back into this conditioning to create
thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.
There are variety of reasons that a report from a
clinical psychologist can help in the understanding
and resolution of a problem:
• To understand self-destructive patterns of behaviour
• To understand the impact of certain courses of
action on an individual’s health and well-being
Clinical psychologists begin their formulation of an
individual and the problems that they are facing with
an understanding that we are not neutral, objective
observers of the world but that we are instead products of our environment. As a result of this our choices
and decisions are heavily influenced by factors that are
not always immediately obvious. Clinical psychologists
work from an evidence-based position where it is acknowledged that all behaviour makes sense if you look
at the context and that labelling a behaviour as ‘good’
or ‘bad’ is unhelpful and creates a barrier to understanding and finding a helpful way through challenging situations. Clinical psychologists complete their
formulation by linking the impact of subsequent experiences back on to the already conditioned mind to
present a rationale for patterns of behaviour and their
consequences.
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• To predict future patterns of behaviour
• To diagnose past and current mental health
conditions and outline their relevance to an individual’s experience
• To make recommendations regarding treatment
options that may support an improvement in an
individual’s circumstances.
Specific examples of these include:
• Why a person has engaged in criminal behaviour
Studies have shown a strong relationship between
childhood trauma and psychological difficulties in
later life and individuals with a depressive illness are
three times more likely to commit a crime than those
in the general population.
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