OK, I'm required to speak out on this one... Psychology is NOT... hear me...
NOT all clinical psychology..... This is like saying that medicine is all
psychiatric medicine. My field is Cognitive Psychology where one thing we
study is how people are able to take the beating of that old ear drum and
get speech from it. We also study visual attention, developmental
differences in perception, etc. At our campus the Psychology department is
divided into Clinical, Social/Heath, Cognitive and Biopsychology. All of
the areas do research and many students foolish enough to make psychology a
major because they think it is an "easy" science are soon disabused of that
notion.

The field of Clinical psychology is itself vastly diverse. There are
behaviorist, Freudians, those that favor drugs only, those that favor self
analysis only.... on and on... I know little of the field myself but I know
it is not uniform anymore than medicine is.... you have the range of
holistic Dr. Weil to slice and dice only heart surgeons...

That isn't to say of course that I can say that the people attracted to the
field aren't a bit ... well unusual... As I said it is not an easy field of
study ... it is not going to be likely that someone who is easy going,
noncompetitive, etc. can survive in the business these days. Not enough
jobs for the ones that want in. I'm not at all offended that people think
that those who go into the field are...well a little or a lot nuts... just
that they think the field is all Clinical...

I'm in programming mode ( trying to write software and stuck debugging) so
excuse the butchered English....

"mad" wrote in message
...

:
Newsgroups: rec.ponds
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 16:02:07 GMT
Subject: For the older ponders...


It is not unusual for psychology majors to come from wildly
disfunctional
families.

boy, do i agree with this one! my whole family is a mess and one of my
nieces has a masters in psychology. she told us later that she was trying
to
figure us all out, including herself. she hasn't yet, but she keeps
trying.
we've all told her, "good luck!" :-D

I tend to get a bit worked up on the subject. Ingrid

that's quite all right.
mad