By Everyone around Vaughan has heard of a psychologist, counselor, orpsychiatrist, but what is a psychotherapist and what’s the difference between them?It’s a good question for a person seeking psychological help, so first, let’s take a look at what the definition is for each:
A counselor is defined as a person trained to guide people with psychological or personal problems. So, what does that mean? It essentially means that they are one form of help for people with any mental health issues. They are also considered to be legally separate from psychologists and psychiatrists in the USA. In most cases, they also have a master’s degree in counseling, but don’t have the same credentials as psychologists, who usually have more training in their field.
What a psychologist does depends on what field they’ve chosen to go in and can involve academic psychology. What most people know them for is for clinical psychology. Those are the people who also help people with their problems by analyzing and studying their behavior. What’s the difference between a counselor a psychologist? A psychologist has a Ph.D. and more training.
A psychiatrist has more training over a psychologist and is considered medical doctors. They can also prescribe medications and are better able to ascertain if a person is suffering from a physical, as opposed to a psychological, issue.
Finally, a psychotherapist is, like all the others, a mental health professional, but approaches patients with different psychological methods to help them overcome the mental issues in their lives.
What’s the difference between all of them? That’s harder to define as they are all devoted to the feed of psychology. The difference really comes more to approach than anything else. Psychiatrists are more likely to prescribe medication for issues whereas a psychotherapist is more about taking the “talk it out” approach to treating their patients.
Ultimately, a psychotherapist’s job is to help people discuss their problems individually, in pairs, or groups, but the central approach is one of being a sounding board for others. How they do this is through something called behavioral therapy. There are a number of different forms of this kind of therapy, but the most common is called cognitive behavioral therapy and involves discussing how a person’s thoughts influence their moods and actions.
It’s by examining this behavior that psychotherapists are able to ascertain what is leading to a person’s mental issues in life and also find a way to alter behaviors into healthier ones. Anther approach to behavioral therapy is play therapy which involves observing children playing to discover what they are unable to express by conventional ways of self-expression. Desensitization therapy is also used to treat people with fears, or phobias, by training them to replace one response with another.
All in all, psychotherapists are able to bring a considerable arsenal of approaches to treating people’s personal issues in order to bring about a better quality of living for a person by alleviating any mental health problems they might have.
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