Week 5: "How do you eat an elephant?"
As we moved into Week 5, our case loads were gradually growing. First sessions with new clients are about 90 minutes long and cover a broad scope. Every session we have with clients needs to be written up, and these first sessions require an extensive write-up, followed by the inevitable redraft after our supervisors review our work and challenge us to meet their high expectations. This takes quite a bit of time. We add to this the research we undertake for each of our clients, our treatment planning, a range of unfamiliar administration tasks, as well as contacting clients and other health professionals. There are also the mandatory individual and group supervision hours, where we receive guidance both as individuals and as a cohort, and the ever-present pressure to make sure we are on track to achieve the requisite client contact hours. On top of this we add our university studies which are demanding at this time. Altogether, it’s a recipe for a bit of stress.
As budding psychologists, how are we managing this? A couple of ways. Firstly, self-care is stressed and reinforced repeatedly, and this is good, but perhaps one of our strongest assets is each other. In the office, we help each other find resources and information, swap ideas for interventions and tips for some of the administrative issues. We support each other, share our frustrations, and sometimes go out for meals together. At the beginning of our placement, when the task seemed enormous, we drew a picture of an elephant – a bit of an odd thing for adults to do – but a great metaphor for how big the task felt to us. It was the idea of breaking a very large task down into smaller bits that are more manageable: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time”. Our elephant now has five bites gone – one for each week of placement. Only fifteen bites to go!
Kylie in psychology clinic consultation room.
Week 7: "Testing, testing, testing!"
Although I only saw a single client this week, it was a very big week as I completed my first psychometric tests. Psychometric testing is designed to objectively assess different skills, and my testing this week was in two parts: intelligence and learning. These tests are highly standardised and some pressure comes with administering them in accordance with strict guidelines. Additional pressure comes from the knowledge that, once administered, the client can’t repeat the test for two years, so it’s important to get it right the first time.
There was careful preparation in the lead-up to the testing. The tests are set out in a logical format, but the rules change for different tasks, there a different starting points for different age-groups, and some circumstances in which you have to go in reverse order before proceeding forward again. Consequently, the preparation was time-intensive, going through each question in each task and marking up the instructions and worksheets with many, many post-it notes: “start here”, “not this bit”, or “time this!”
Despite having been given great training in psychometric testing, testing with clients is a lot more demanding. Practise sessions with colleagues involves stopping at every query or mistake, referring to the guide-books, and discussing how it should be done, which gives lots of mini-breaks. However, with a client, it’s quite intense. Strong focus is required to supervise the client’s completion of tasks, while asking questions (in a very specific way), managing different stimuli for the questions, and surreptitiously juggling the stopwatch and recording the answers, all the while maintaining a calm environment and managing the relationship with the client.
After two sessions of nearly 4 hours and nearly 3 hours, we were done. Seeing my client work so hard for such a long time was inspiring and it was a very rich experience. Over the next few weeks I’ll take a deep-dive into all the data and I’m looking forward to seeing the story it will tell for my client.
