The Skeleton Cupboard: The Making of a Clinical Psychologist

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Asphyxiation: that was the problem, of course. If only she’d died instantly from the head trauma, the crime would have been treated as murder. If only she hadn’t been a stubborn, wilful woman – a woman who had fled Nazi Germany pregnant with my father, a woman who had lost many of her family in concentration camps, a woman who never took anything lying down, except when she was beaten with an iron fire poker. she may not have been the most successful of all of us in applied IQ terms but by God she outdid us all in her emotional intelligence.. As discussed above, I think the author went a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitle overboard with the "in-the-perspective-of-my-younger-self" thing. The writing was really hard to get through at times.

This is the hook of The Skeleton Cupboard, the book I’d promised to review by Professor Tanya Byron, a Chartered Clinical Psychologist of over twenty years who specialised in children and adolescents. She has published many books, done relevant TV and radio segments, and conducted the well known Byron Review: Safer children in a digital world in 2008, with a follow up in 2010. This book is her recorded experience of being on the clinical psychology doctorate training program. The tone is refreshing as she reveals her deepest frustrations and insecurities in a candid manor, while her exploration of human nature in both the patients and practitioners reduces the stigma of the profession and shows how anyone can get into it. It is an honest account and inspirational so I cannot recommend it enough for anyone interested in the fields of psychology, mental health, and humanity! This book is actually very frustrating. In the introduction the people whose cases are described in the book are revealed to be 'constructs which is just a fancy way of admitting they are 'fictional', as the epilogue describes them. The legend in mental health services is that in general a third of those we treat will get ‘better’, a third will stay the same and a third will get worse. We can’t ‘cure’ everyone, and this is not only because some cannot be cured’ – sometimes we just don’t know how to. In fact, the term ‘cure’ sits unhelpfully in any understanding of supporting those with mental health difficultiesA region of the brain that influences higher mental functions often associated with intelligence, such as the ability to foresee the consequences of actions, planning, comprehension and mood.

All these questions about the shit end of life, at a time when I should have been unthinkingly hedonistic. At fifteen years old, my frontal lobes were in a post-pubertal stage of reorganization, which meant I should have been taking my own risks and thinking bugger all about the consequences. De verhalen van Imogen, Paul en Harold grepen me naar de keel en op het einde van ieder hoofdstuk dacht ik inderdaad telkens ‘niets is wat het lijkt’. Je zet je personages met heel erg veel respect neer en daar heb ik alleen maar bewondering voor. Ondanks dat het misschien niet altijd gemakkelijk voor me was om dit boek te lezen kan ik toch zeggen dat ik content ben met het feit dat ik het boek gelezen heb. Het heeft me weer een inzicht gegeven op verschillende vlakken. Bijvoorbeeld hoe confronterend de opleiding tot klinisch psycholoog kan zijn, wat het doet met degene die de opleiding volgt maar ook hoe patiënten geholpen kunnen worden als de juiste klik er is of juist niet als die mist. Tenslotte is iedereen mens maar zijn de hulpvragen divers net als de uitkomsten.I first became fascinated by the frontal lobes of the human brain when I saw my grandmother’s sprayed across the skirting board of her dark and cluttered house. I was fifteen. There is a curious elision. Chris, the one tutor she does describe at length, with whom she has a warring and engaging relationship for three years, is both the clinical tutor who organises her placements and her clinical supervisor on every placement! But trainees have a different supervisor on each placement and the roles of the clinical tutor and clinical supervisor are not the same. Where are Byron’s clinical supervisors and why are they not in the book? In my experience, supervisors play a huge part in shaping the experiences of trainees. Did they not do so for the young Tanya, I wonder? Alzheimer's is always heart-breaking, but the poor man, Harold, described in this book, is more so than anything I have ever read. Because Alzheimer's leaves old memories intact, a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp is doomed to relive his time there, the present having left him. He was a German Jew who after the war became a famous scientist in London who suffered terribly from PTSD and couldn't stand in line or bear uniforms. He was supported by his wife, Saira, also Jewish, a survivor of Mathausen concentration camp (her three sisters had been killed in front of her) and she had her own issues including infertility, camp doctors having experimented on her body. In her latter years, more advanced than her husband in dementia, she couldn't be showered, she had to be bathed with a sponge by her husband, she thought the showers were the deadly gas of the Nazi execution chambers, and to help him she would put a damp cloth over his nose and mouth.

These two old people supported each other to the end. She died in her husband's arms, by then he had retreated entirely into himself, into the hell of a never-ending concentration camp. Ik leerde de vaste klanten van de drugskliniek beter kennen en genoot van het geklets in de wachtruimte; het is vreemd hoe ook zo’n helse plek al snel vertrouwd en bijna normaal kan aanvoelen.” OK, to be honest, I am not entirely sure that my grandmother’s brains were on the skirting board when I went into her house that day at the age of fifteen. Is that a direct memory or something I told myself later on? In fact, I’m not sure I remember much of that day at all except two things: a massive bloodstain on the carpet and my father making a noise like an animal caught in a trap.There is a scene where the author went to her gay bar with "her gals/girls". They progressively get rekted and all go home until she is alone. It is then she happens to see her strict and cold mentor, Chris, passing the cooties to Anne, her current clinical attachment supervisor. This is significant because when Chris first brought the author to Anne for introductions and orientation, the two of them were extremely passive aggressive, savage and were retorting at each other the entire time.

She is a good writer, and the stories she tells are exciting, challenging and thought-provoking. This is a very enjoyable book to read. If Tanya Byron felt like a change of career, then writing fiction is well within her compass. The entire book, I get the uneasy subtle sense that the author is channeling these "inspired" characters to indirectly compliment herself. In the first book the sociopath compliments her amazing blue eyes, her facial structure etc. over and over and over and over again. Then in other scenes people tell her how pretty she looks, could be a model, etc. Even in the case that people did tell her this in real life, I do not see any purpose in her consciously deciding that it was a worthy conversational topic to include into this book other than to praise herself. I first became fascinated by the frontal lobes of the human brain when I saw my grandmother’s sprayed across the sk irting board… In that moment I became the rational coper. My darling father howled, but I just shut down and began to try and understand how and why. This book is written as a chronological story, for anyone curious about clinical psychology and mental health, and seems to be specifically useful for those who intend to work within the relevant settings. Further under the microscope, it is an enlightening read for anyone who plans to undertake the clinical psychology doctorate, providing one of many perspectives on what the training may entail. However, I would recommend this to anyone who wants a good read, psychology related or not, due to the fascinating array of stories.I promised to review this book so let’s start by asking “Who is The Skeleton Cupboard for?” Hyperbole aside it is a must read for every aspiring psychologist, meriting a place on our undergraduate reading lists and if clinical psychology is your calling its contents will have you salivating: