What is the difference between a clinical psychologist and a counseling psychologist?
One of my colleagues put it very beautifully for me the other day – counselling is when you get advice and help for dealing with your everyday life, while therapy involves deep change in who you are and how you live your life. In actuality, any treatment you receive will likely be a mixture of both. Counselling will tend to be shorter. Therapy will tend to be longer.
In order to be licensed as a psychologist, you need a doctoral degree, either a PsyD or a PhD. From there, psychologists can have many different focuses – from working with people who have physical health issues to working with people who are severely mentally ill to helping people self-actualize. Ask your psychologist what their focus is.
Clinical psychologists and counseling psychologists receive different types of training and therefore often practice in different settings and see different kinds of clients. Both clinical psychologists and counseling psychologists may hold the Ph.D. But, whereas counseling psychologists are trained to counsel and provide therapy for people with “everyday” sorts of problems, clinical psychologists are trained to provide therapy for people suffering from a wider range of problems, for example, from problems involving adjusting to daily hassles to problems entailing severe psychological disorders.
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