Surviving Your Clinical Placement: Reflections, Suggestions and Unsolicited Advice

Surviving Your Clinical Placement primarily attempts to provide the training psychotherapist, counselor, or social worker with a practical text that helps to clarify some of the issues trainees can expect to confront when doing clinical work in difficult institutional or correctional settings. Included are experiences related to the influences of institutional cultural on clinical work, supervisory bias and clinical burnout, and unrealized personal expectations. To better understand this process, the text includes a variety of short clinical vignettes from training psychotherapists who reflect upon those aspects of their clinical placement that were most important or influential to their development as professional psychotherapists. The text concludes with two chapters from practicing professionals who address the specific issues of clinical supervision.

Surviving Your Clinical Placement primarily attempts to provide the training psychotherapist, counselor, or social worker with a practical text that helps to clarify some of the issues trainees can expect to confront when doing clinical work in difficult institutional or correctional settings. Included are experiences related to the influences of institutional cultural on clinical work, supervisory bias and clinical burnout, and unrealized personal expectations. To better understand this process, the text includes a variety of short clinical vignettes from training psychotherapists who reflect upon those aspects of their clinical placement that were most important or influential to their development as professional psychotherapists. The text concludes with two chapters from practicing professionals who address the specific issues of clinical supervision.

David Polizzi is a professor at Indiana State University. Matthew Draper is a professor in the psychology department at Utah Valley University.