caring for your mental health goes well beyond getting a prescription in this session dr dahm
walks through the types of mental health professionals that offer services other than
prescribing medication he breaks down the types of training they undergo what treatments they offer
and how to find the best type for you so from my understanding mental health providers are
broken up into two big categories those that can prescribe and those that cannot let's
first talk about the ones that can not prescribe medication let's start with a psychologist all
right so a psychologist first of all though let's back up one second i want to say that
every single one of these providers has a very important place in behavioral health i don't
want the viewers to think that one is better than the other or one is more important than the
other because i honestly feel and this is just my experience in the behavioral healthcare field that
it is a team effort okay and unfortunately there can be some you know turf wars between
psychologists and psychiatrists and case workers and and social
and to me i think that's silly i think it's very important to acknowledge that to get the best help
everyone has to work as a team and one is not necessarily most more important than the other
and that's that's what i just want to get out there all right so speaking of psychologists
so important in the process psychologists as we spoke are phds or psyds it's a doctorate level of
training these are people that went to four years of college and then four years of graduate school
and a lot of psychologists that i worked with or work with on a daily basis are just amazing
at what they do and they tend to focus on therapeutic interventions so you can either
be a clinical psychologist which means that you interact with patients or you can be a research
psychologist right so there's a little bit of a broad spectrum as to what a psychologist does i
know plenty of people that are phds in psychology but don't see patients but they love being in the
lab and they gather data and do research and do papers and it's wonderful like research papers
clinical psychologists deal with patients and in most cases they tend to find a paradigm that they
sort of like and we've talked about cbt and dbt or act all these different sort of therapeutic
interventions and they tend to specialize in some now there are psychologists that are sort of
a jack of all trades too um but keep in mind that psychologist or clinical psychologist is going to
be a highly trained individual that is going to focus on therapeutic intervention if you're
going to see one okay and just to in case this is someone's first time at med circle cbt dbt and act
or act are all different types of treatments we have series on all three of those they're
available at medcircle.com all right so when what kind of training would a psychologist and clinical
psychologist undergo so the training that they're going to undergo is so first they're going to go
to an undergraduate college right so you graduate high school in the united states and the next step
is we're going to go to a four-year college a lot of you can major in whatever you want basically
it can be a psychology degree it could be an economics degree it doesn't matter but you're
going to apply to a graduate school in psychology that offers a phd degree and then what they're
going to do is they're going to go to a four-year program of training in the behavioral sciences
and there are different tracks there's research based tracks there's clinical based tracks so
it really depends on the school that you go to as to sort of what the direction your career is going
to go basically so okay so psychologists are going to get that that four years of training maybe even
some internship experience after that four years working with an established psychologist or a
neurologist or whatever it may be cool so it's it's extensive training for sure now what is a
what is the role of a counselor counselor so counselor's kind of a funny word right it's
kind of a vague word because you can call a phd psychologist a counselor right however you know
when we talk about counselors it's sort of it's like an umbrella term and under that umbrella can
be a psychologist a phd or a psyd you also have master's level of training which means in the
united states at least four years of college and then about a two-year master's program in either
licensed counselor like a licensed clinical social worker or an independent licensed counselor right
that's usually a master's level program and these are people that focus on therapeutic interventions
family counseling marital counseling interpersonal psychotherapy and they
provide therapeutic intervention right and are they using things like cbt and bbc certainly
can yeah they can certainly do training in that so what is and they're seeing patients sure so what's
the difference then between a psychologist and a counselor so a psychologist can be a counselor a
social worker can be a counselor that basically means you're seeing patients for psychotherapy
understood right so we're kind of splitting hairs with the words but the important thing is they're
all providing a therapeutic intervention for the patient you know psychologists have a
doctorate degree so it's a little bit more of an intensive degree they may have spent a lot of time
focusing on a certain research based sort of field they could be very very profound
you know proficient in cbt for example right and i'm not saying that the master's level is not
good it's certainly great it's an amazing level of education but psychologists tend to be very
research based i don't want to paint like i'm painting with a very broad brush here of course
so the difference is the length of time and training between a master's level clinician and a
psychologist now you just said the word clinician oh can that be interchanged with counselor or is
that a separate yeah this is so funny right so i think the interchangeable words here are counselor
and clinician okay what about therapists and therapists there you go you just found three so
that's why it's so confusing because honestly i'm a psychiatrist you can call me your therapist
you can call me your counselor you know so so the truth is if i'm providing therapeutic intervention
for you like psychotherapy and you're seeing me once a week and we're doing cbt then i'm your cbt
counselor right so or my cbd cbt clinician or my cbt therapist right got it now and you know the
way these words are adopted though in most cases if i'm working at a hospital for example and i'm
the psychiatrist and someone says hi the clinician would like to talk to you i'm going to assume
that it's a master's or phd level individual in behavioral health that's involved in the team
right so usually clinician is geared towards the individual that's doing the therapy okay right on
the team okay now social workers what's what is a social worker and is there a difference between a
social worker and a clinical social worker right so so the degrees are a licensed clinical social
worker right and there are social workers that focus on a pathway for more um clinical
therapeutic intervention too so social worker means that they did a lot of the training that a
licensed therapist like a like an lpc a licensed professional therapist meaning a master's level
um type of care but social workers also learn um sort of the unique way to do what's called
case management and care planning and disposition planning for people that are in the hospital so
social workers really know the intricacies of
available resources in the community discharge planning for for patients at hospitals things
like that so social workers have that sort of specialty under their belt as well interesting
now be between psychologist counselor clinician therapist clinical social worker and licensed
professional counselor and lpc are there any other assessment and therapy providers that
we're missing out of that group well i think you could certainly have a psychiatrist that can do
that for you and we'll talk about that you can even have an apn or a nurse practitioner or an np
that provides therapeutic intervention as well so they can fall under that category too understood
but i think it's i think a good distinction the way you sort of broke it down was prescribers
and non-prescribers i think is a pretty good way to go because that's the most clear delineation
so if someone has bipolar disorder for example that is something that requires a medication
to be treated they could see any number of the individuals that we discussed but in addition to
that they would have to see someone who can prescribe medication most likely i mean of
course there are circumstances where someone with bipolar disorder can be managed with
with just psychotherapeutic intervention but you know as you sort of climb the ladder
of of care or acuity of care right um and you start with let's just say a therapist which could
be let's just say a master's in clinical social work or a licensed professional counselor right
if that counselor feels like you know what this looks like a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and
it looks like medication would probably help you then they might refer you to a prescriber okay
and then that's where we get involved with the team effort that i was talking about that's very
very important are there any circumstances where a psychologist could prescribe medication yeah
okay now as you know and as our viewers probably know it's actually pretty hard to find behavioral
health providers in the united states right now it's a shortage so there are certain areas of
the country that have a shortage of prescribers because you know we know that medication does help
a certain part of the behavioral health community for sure and we have a shortage of prescribers so
certain states i believe right now there are about five states in certain areas where psychologists
can actually prescribe non-controlled substances meaning medicines for depression and bipolar
disorder for example but non-addictive medicines or medicines that aren't considered dangerous by
the cds or dea okay wonderful that was i needed that so bad i i've been talking to you and our
other doctors and patients and i was always just like well what is the difference between all of
those that was so clear thank you for providing that in our next session we're going to talk about
the variety of prescribers now these are mental health professionals that can prescribe medication
their titles who they are and what you need to know in our next session