What's the difference between a therapist and a phsycologist?!
Question: A therapist is a person that is trained to hear your problems and help you through it.
A psychologist is the same except they can prescribe medications and therapists can't. Psychologists are doctors and go through more years of education than therapists but they are both very helpful.
Answers: A therapist is a person that is trained to hear your problems and help you through it.
A psychologist is the same except they can prescribe medications and therapists can't. Psychologists are doctors and go through more years of education than therapists but they are both very helpful.
A psychologist has a training that is concerned with certain sorts of assessment, with various methods of helping, and may work in a huge range of contexts from educational psychology to hospital work to businesses. Often they work within a team, and are expected to share their work knowledge with other members of the team.
A therapist - more properly 'psychotherapist' - is someone who has undergone a long (typically four years or more) training including their own personal psychotherapy in order to work with individuals, couples or families. A therapist is focussed entirely on the confidential one-to-one (or one-to-couple, or one-to-family) therapeutic role.
However, there are some psychologists who have done further training in some forms of counselling or psychotherapy. You need to check that they have this training and have been in therapy themselves if you intend to consult them in a therapeutic role. Rather a lot of them, in the UK anyway, are trained only in cognitive behavioural therapy, which is a rather superficial and formulaic approach, which works very well for simple issues and is useless with deep-seated problems.
EDIT: I'm getting the impression that the situation in the USA is completely different from the UK. Here, a psychologist and a therapist (whether counsellor or psychotherapist) result from completely different trainings and a psychotherapist will often have had a longer and more in-depth training than a psychologist. Many psychologists have no therapeutic skills beyond CBT; counsellors and psychotherapists have no training in assessment and work entirely in a therapeutic context. The comment about a therapist being someone who hadn't gone to doctorate level with psychology is irrelevant to the UK context. My psychotherapy training was a six year part-time training, involved being in personal therapy throughout and developed clinical skills through intensive supervision of work with a few clients. Oh, and in the UK, psychologists most decidedly are not doctors - they do not have a medical training. Psychiatry is completely different, being a specialism following medical training.
psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors are all types of therapists (therapists = licensed mental health professional)
a psychiatrist is a therapist who went to medical school and completed 4-5 years of residency training and can write prescriptions, and is more trained in the medical stuff behind mental disorders. they use medications more to alleviate mental issues rather than a psychologist
a psychologist is a therapist who has a Ph.D in psychology, and is more trained in treating a patient with few or no medications, using other types of therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy and psychotherapy (some psychiatrists are trained in this although psychologists are more trained in it). oh and only psychologists in certain states can prescribe medicines (its like lousiana and two other states)
and a counselor is a therapist who has only completed a master's degree in psychology rather than continuing on to get a Ph. D and being a psychologist
hope that helps!