Potential to become a psychologist with mental illness?

[neurom]

Sorry all for yet another post, but I wanted to get some opinions from those actually within the field. I have been in therapy since I was 12 years old (early 20s now) for severe mental health issues (probably what you're thinking) and I have been medicated and stable since 2019. This has caused some ebbs and flows in my undergrad studies, as I started school later (around 19-20) at a community college and just recently transferred to a university to finish my bachelors. My GPA is okay (3.5, upward trend), and I am finally on the perfect combo of meds and therapy, as well as getting diagnosed with ADHD and getting medicated for that last year which helped me tremendously. I don't really like the term, but I am extremely, extremely high functioning for the illness that I have, and have never even been hospitalized. I do not use accommodations at school so I'm not really worried about that aspect, but I'm just wondering, honestly, what the chances I have for becoming a psychologist are?
Since I have been medicated, my illness has only interfered with my schooling once or twice about a year and a half to 2 years ago (taking a semester off/taking 1-2 classes instead of a full load), and the biggest factor on my poor grades was, in my opinion, my undiagnosed ADHD. Once getting on medication for that, everything significantly improved, including my mood and outlook on life, my motivation and all that jazz.

I definitely will not be disclosing this when I apply to grad school, or probably ever besides to online, anonymous communities and close family and friends, as I know the stigma against my illness is incredibly strong. There are less than a handful of people in my personal life that know about this, and I intend to keep it this way as it isn't something I like for people to know. However, I'm just curious if anyone has any experience having a mental illness and attending grad school/becoming a psychologist or mental health professional? My last therapist was the one who suggested that I would be great in the mental health field for a multitude of reasons, and after being interested in psych due to my own mental illness and wanting to understand it, I realized that I'm very passionate about the field (for way more reasons than just psychopathology). I know that many people say that most psychologists and mental health professionals have their own experiences with mental health that usually has driven them to be where they are, but how common is it that someone suffers from a severe mental illness and still goes on to succeed? Sorry, just have been doubting myself recently, maybe because I'm weening off some of my meds (cause I have good control over my emotions and symptoms - yay!) and worry about that. Thanks for any feedback you can provide.

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[borne_before]

Yes. You can become a psychologist with a history of mental illness. My own ADHD/dysgraphia was instrumental in choosing my own career path. Many prominent psychologists have disclosed pretty severe pathologies (Steven C Hayes, Linehan). The question is will your own challenges affect patient care and is being a psychologist the career for you.

 

[thebalmofhurtminds]

Yes, as stated above, you certainly can. Apart from taking care of yourself, one of the biggest things to be aware of is that just because you have experience with your own MH struggles does not necessarily mean that you know what your patients are going through. I've noticed some not-super-well-trained folks who think that their own mental illness counts as training or experience to treat - it's sometimes hard to separate, but keep that in mind.

 

[Sanman]

Do you have the potential to become a psychologist with a history of mental illness? Absolutely, at least as much as anyone else does. Should you become a psychologist? That is a question you need to decide for yourself. As someone with a chronic physical health condition, I will say this:

1. I found grad school to be much more challenging than undergraduate studies. The balance I had previously found with eating healthy, sleeping, exercising, self-care was challenged several times due to the high workload expectations and various commitments (comps, internship, dissertation, etc.). The first several years out of school were also long hours establishing myself, though this may vary. Decide for yourself what you need your balance to be. I enjoy being a part of this profession. However, I know my health took a hit for a good decade in order to accomplish my academic/professional goals.

2. During school and particularly the later portions of training, I found the health insurance to be quite variable. Depending what medications you are on and how you qualify for health insurance, it may be a challenge to afford the medications you need. This is something you should think about before diving in.

Good luck to you, whatever you decide.

 

[R. Matey]

100% possible. I've met several very successful psychologists with ADHD. I agree with upthread comments that you need to be sure you take care of yourself during graduate study (this applies even if you didn't have ADHD) and, despite recent trends towards "shared lived experience" in psychotherapy, remember that you are not qualified to comment on another person's experience just because you have a diagnosis in common (ADHD, also is really big tent).

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

It's possible, though the dx will dictate how much structure/support you'll need. You'll also need to figure out if you want to disclose, to whom, and how that may impact your training.

 

[cara susanna]

I'm gonna be honest: I find it most difficult to work with patients who have the same chronic health condition as me, or are going through the same psychosocial stressors. It's difficult to not make it about myself and MY experiences, and it's also more difficult for me to be objective. Not to mention it can increase my own distress by reminding me of my own issues. YMMV, of course. Marsha Linehan proves this isn't a deal breaker. But I do think you have to have excellent boundaries and insight into your behavior in the room with patients.

 

[neurom]

Yes, as stated above, you certainly can. Apart from taking care of yourself, one of the biggest things to be aware of is that just because you have experience with your own MH struggles does not necessarily mean that you know what your patients are going through. I've noticed some not-super-well-trained folks who think that their own mental illness counts as training or experience to treat - it's sometimes hard to separate, but keep that in mind.

I appreciate this response greatly. I never really thought about that becoming a problem, and I definitely see how it could because I have a habit of wanting to relate to others when I can. Of course I never assume that I have the same experience as someone else, but I just have a habit of saying "me too," and relating my own experience a bit too much. I'll start to work on this now before it gets too bad.

Do you have the potential to become a psychologist with a history of mental illness? Absolutely, at least as much as anyone else does. Should you become a psychologist? That is a question you need to decide for yourself. As someone with a chronic physical health condition, I will say this:

1. I found grad school to be much more challenging than undergraduate studies. The balance I had previously found with eating healthy, sleeping, exercising, self-care was challenged several times due to the high workload expectations and various commitments (comps, internship, dissertation, etc.). The first several years out of school were also long hours establishing myself, though this may vary. Decide for yourself what you need your balance to be. I enjoy being a part of this profession. However, I know my health took a hit for a good decade in order to accomplish my academic/professional goals.

2. During school and particularly the later portions of training, I found the health insurance to be quite variable. Depending what medications you are on and how you qualify for health insurance, it may be a challenge to afford the medications you need. This is something you should think about before diving in.

Good luck to you, whatever you decide.

Thank you for your honesty about grad school, and the bit about insurance. I never factored that part in, and now it makes me a little bit wary because my medications are quite expensive. I'm currently trying to ween off of everything besides my ADHD meds, maybe by that time I will be to that point.
At this point, my stress levels are high with the new transition to university, life, and work stressors. I am trying to pack in multiple different things to my last two years in undergrad (a thesis, internship, seminars, research lab) to try and get myself prepared for a heavy workload and learn time management as I have a family and busy life. Do you happen to have any advice on how to best prepare myself for grad school?

I'm gonna be honest: I find it most difficult to work with patients who have the same chronic health condition as me, or are going through the same psychosocial stressors. It's difficult to not make it about myself and MY experiences, and it's also more difficult for me to be objective. Not to mention it can increase my own distress by reminding me of my own issues. YMMV, of course. Marsha Linehan proves this isn't a deal breaker. But I do think you have to have excellent boundaries and insight into your behavior in the room with patients.

Thank you, this is actually something that I was quite worried about. I wanted to work with severe mental illnesses, particularly in children, which I think could remind me a lot of my own issues as I was diagnosed as a young teen. But, I think that if I work on my boundaries and insight, like you said, I may be able to manage this. Hopefully I will be exposed to this soon so I can tell if I'm able to manage all of the additional stress. How do you manage to not take your work home with you when you have patients like this? (Mentally speaking)

 

[summerbabe]

My belief is that outside of conditions that largely correlate with lower IQ (like schizophrenia) or things like schiozoid personality where a career in psychology wouldn't make any practical sense, I would expect diagnoses for psychologists to roughly mimic the general population and that there are plenty of working psychologists who manage both acute and chronic mental health while doing this job.

With that said, this field is not a good fit for everybody who has an academic and/or personal interest in psychology/mental health. While I work with fellow psychologists all day, every day, I also know tons of people who either left grad school (of their own will) or have left the field/paused using their license for all kinds of practical reasons but also sometimes after discovering some type of poor fit.

One thing I encourage people considering clinical careers to do is to imagine a couple decades of 40 hour work weeks where you'll likely spend 4-6 hours each day, 260 days a year, in direct patient care. Most people aren't built for that even though it can be rewarding because that's also stressful and interpersonally taxing. Hell, a bunch of psychologists that I know probably aren't built for that (at least over the true long haul).

There are ways to reduce clinical load through admin tasks, teaching, and other avenues but that could be a good thing to consider this fit with you as a whole person, which includes but is not limited to any health things that you are/will encounter. Good luck!

 

[borne_before]

My belief is that outside of conditions that largely correlate with lower IQ (like schizophrenia) or things like schiozoid personality where a career in psychology wouldn't make any practical sense, I would expect diagnoses for psychologists to roughly mimic the general population and that there are plenty of working psychologists who manage both acute and chronic mental health while doing this job.

With that said, this field is not a good fit for everybody who has an academic and/or personal interest in psychology/mental health. While I work with fellow psychologists all day, every day, I also know tons of people who either left grad school (of their own will) or have left the field/paused using their license for all kinds of practical reasons but also sometimes after discovering some type of poor fit.

One thing I encourage people considering clinical careers to do is to imagine a couple decades of 40 hour work weeks where you'll likely spend 4-6 hours each day, 260 days a year, in direct patient care. Most people aren't built for that even though it can be rewarding because that's also stressful and interpersonally taxing. Hell, a bunch of psychologists that I know probably aren't built for that (at least over the true long haul).

There are ways to reduce clinical load through admin tasks, teaching, and other avenues but that could be a good thing to consider this fit with you as a whole person, which includes but is not limited to any health things that you are/will encounter. Good luck!

I feel a little called out over this...

 

[cara susanna]

I appreciate this response greatly. I never really thought about that becoming a problem, and I definitely see how it could because I have a habit of wanting to relate to others when I can. Of course I never assume that I have the same experience as someone else, but I just have a habit of saying "me too," and relating my own experience a bit too much. I'll start to work on this now before it gets too bad.

Thank you for your honesty about grad school, and the bit about insurance. I never factored that part in, and now it makes me a little bit wary because my medications are quite expensive. I'm currently trying to ween off of everything besides my ADHD meds, maybe by that time I will be to that point.
At this point, my stress levels are high with the new transition to university, life, and work stressors. I am trying to pack in multiple different things to my last two years in undergrad (a thesis, internship, seminars, research lab) to try and get myself prepared for a heavy workload and learn time management as I have a family and busy life. Do you happen to have any advice on how to best prepare myself for grad school?

Thank you, this is actually something that I was quite worried about. I wanted to work with severe mental illnesses, particularly in children, which I think could remind me a lot of my own issues as I was diagnosed as a young teen. But, I think that if I work on my boundaries and insight, like you said, I may be able to manage this. Hopefully I will be exposed to this soon so I can tell if I'm able to manage all of the additional stress. How do you manage to not take your work home with you when you have patients like this? (Mentally speaking)

I do trauma work so I've gotten pretty good at not taking things home with me. It helps to process and talk about difficult cases or things that you find personally too close to you with supportive colleagues. It's also good to regularly engage in self care and recognize your own limits.

 

[summerbabe]

I feel a little called out over this...

I'm definitely speaking from personal experience too. I have days where this work feels perfect and days where I'm like WTF? Why don't I just have a normal job?

Overall, it's still probably the right fit and I think I've grown to be pretty decent at what I do but I definitely find myself daydreaming about other paths that I could have taken.

 

[LM02]

There has been a movement in the field to acknowledge and accept the importance of lived experience among psychologists. This is a great piece.

Leveraging the Strengths of Psychologists with Lived Experience of Psychopathology

Psychopathology is a common element of the human experience, and psychological scientists are not immune. Recent empirical data demonstrate that a significant proportion of clinical, counseling, and school psychology faculty and graduate students have ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[texanpsychdoc]

Yes you can be a psychologist with having a mental illness. You would just want to ensure that you are taking appropriate action to ensure it doesn't affect your professional practice. This is typically the basis for most public service and safety jobs. For example, when I evaluate folks for police, firefighters, federal agent, etc. types of jobs, we can't discriminate against someone because they have a history of previous or even current mental illness, rather, we would have to determine if such illness could impact that candidate's ability to function in the public service role they are interviewing for.

On a related note, sometimes we have psychologists who might have a DSM-5-TR diagnosable disorder that ends up affecting their professional practice, which then potentially ends up with the board, and the board then makes a decision to have that psychologist seek treatment and/or professional consultation for a period of time to address the factors influencing unprofessional practice. Typically when this happens, the board will ask for that psychologist to undergo a fitness for duty (FFD) evaluation before they are "restored" to functioning as an independently licensed psychologist. A FFD evaluation is pretty typical in occupations where the public is potentially at risk for harm should the licensed provider (licensed peace officer, physician, psychologist, etc.) be in a position where they are engaging in maleficence

In general, mental health is a fluid construct - just because someone has been healthy for most of their life doesn't mean that will remain 100% for the duration across their lifespan - life happens and can affect people in different ways, thus, mental illness in itself is not going to preclude you from being a psychologist. If it comes up for you in a manner that I described above, even in those cases (very case-dependent), it still doesn't mean you will 100% always lose your license, but it may mean you would have to address those symptoms affecting your work in order to continue to be a psychologist.

 

[Justanothergrad]

some relevant work

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/17456916211072826

APA PsycNet

psycnet.apa.org

 

[smalltownpsych]

Licensing boards have questions about mental health treatment and so it might be something that you need to disclose. I personally have found that the field is not as accepting of personal struggles as one would think it should be so it has been frustrating at times, but it hasn’t stopped me or others such as mentioned above. I do think we are moving into a more accepting place where the discussions can be more open and that is a good thing.

 

[ClinicalABA]

Sometimes we just have to get over ourselves. "Being a psychologist" is ( or- imho- should be) largely about applying a set of learned skills to specific problems, with the goals of reducing the negative impacts of that problem by making the problem go away, teaching new skills to address the problem, or teaching strategies to better control or tolerate the effects of that problem. "Psychologist" is an occupation. In that manner it is not very different from a multitude of other public facing occupations. It really should be about your training and the application of that training, not about who you are as a person. In the same manner that, say, a real estate agent can successfully do their job despite mental illness, as psychologist can do the same. Obviously, there are interactions between how we apply our training and personal traits/characteristics, but effective psychologists learn to minimized the effects of the latter to be better at the former (and in the same way the above mentioned real estate agent does). We may encounter some things at work that "hit home" a little tougher than in other professions (but probably not as much as we would like to think), but we act professionally and minimize the negative effects of such things on our clients and ourselves. When we can't do that, we need to step back and get the help we need, just as with any other profession.

This is not to say that what we do is all "technique." I think that I am good at what I do because I am very well trained, stick to my training as best I can, and seek consultation with other well-trained individuals when I'm not certain of something. I'm pretty sure I can train a reasonably intelligent person to do the same. However, I think that I am better at my job because I genuinely like kids, like to act goofy (and feel no embarrassment in doing so), and believe that just being kind to people can go a long way (even if they don't seem to appreciate or reciprocate it). I have tried to train students/interns to be those things, with much less consistent success.