How can psychology be dangerous

There are plenty of entry-level job options with a bachelor's degree. The fact is, however, that if you want better job opportunities and higher pay, then you are going to need a graduate degree. A master's degree is considered the minimum for many career paths such as counseling, industrial-organizational psychology , school psychology , and health psychology. Careers in clinical psychology require a doctorate degree plus a supervised internship and passage of state exams.

One of the greatest things about psychology is the huge range of specialization options. Forensic psychology, social psychology, counseling psychology, school psychology, and developmental psychology are just a few that you might want to consider. No matter what your interest might be, there is probably an area of psychology that would appeal to you.

The key is to carefully research your chosen field to determine how much education and training you will need to enter that field. Psychologists face stress from a variety of sources. Deadlines, irregular hours, mountains of paperwork, and clients dealing with major life crises are just a few of the things that might put a drain on your emotions.

While there are things you can do to improve your coping skills, this might not be the best profession for you if emotionally-charged situations make you overly anxious.

This does not mean that you need to feel discouraged if you struggle to deal with stress. There are plenty of ways to build resilience, and you might actually find that helping other people might make you feel calmer and more capable.

If becoming a psychologist is your dream, explore strategies that will help you cope with the stress of the job. People often stress the importance of pursuing a career that is best for the current situation or economy. You might feel pressured to pursue a college major or a job path simply because it appears to be the most practical or financially rewarding option. But you should feel excited and passionate about the field you are pursuing. If you don't love the subject and the profession itself, you probably shouldn't be majoring in psychology.

It is never too late to switch gears and change direction. If you suddenly realize that chemistry or microbiology is more in line with your interests and goals, don't hesitate to pursue your dreams.

If you do decide to make a change, the first thing you need to do is go talk to your academic advisor right away. Your advisor can help you devise a plan of action, figure out which courses will fill core requirements for your new major, and help you determine an academic plan that will allow you to accomplish your goals.

One of the biggest misunderstandings among students planning on majoring in psychology is that they expect to start making big bucks immediately after earning their undergraduate degree. Yes, there is certainly the potential to earn a high salary in certain fields.

Are those wages the norm? No, and especially not for those without a doctorate degree. The reality is that there are many professions within psychology that are low- to mid-salary. Actual salaries depend on a wide variety of factors, including the specialty area you choose, the sector in which you work, where you choose to live, and the degree and experience level you have. One advantage of a psychology degree—strong predicted job outlook. Demand for psychologists is expected to grow at a rate faster than the average for all careers over the next decade.

If the salary is one of your greatest motivations for majoring in psychology, you need to spend some time carefully researching some of the high-paying options. Perhaps the simplest approach to conceptualizing psychological disorders is to label behaviors, thoughts, and inner experiences that are atypical, distressful, dysfunctional, and sometimes even dangerous, as signs of a disorder.

For example, if you ask a classmate for a date and you are rejected, you probably would feel a little dejected. Such feelings would be normal. If you felt extremely depressed—so much so that you lost interest in activities, had difficulty eating or sleeping, felt utterly worthless, and contemplated suicide—your feelings would be atypical , would deviate from the norm, and could signify the presence of a psychological disorder.

Just because something is atypical, however, does not necessarily mean it is disordered. As you will learn, some disorders, although not exactly typical, are far from atypical, and the rates in which they appear in the population are surprisingly high. Red hair is considered unusual, but not abnormal. If we can agree that merely being atypical is an insufficient criterion for a having a psychological disorder, is it reasonable to consider behavior or inner experiences that differ from widely expected cultural values or expectations as disordered?

Using this criterion, a woman who walks around a subway platform wearing a heavy winter coat in July while screaming obscenities at strangers may be considered as exhibiting symptoms of a psychological disorder. Her actions and clothes violate socially accepted rules governing appropriate dress and behavior; these characteristics are atypical.

Violating cultural expectations is not, in and of itself, a satisfactory means of identifying the presence of a psychological disorder. Since behavior varies from one culture to another, what may be expected and considered appropriate in one culture may not be viewed as such in other cultures. A person who refuses to acknowledge such gestures might be considered socially awkward—perhaps even disordered—for violating this expectation.

However, such expectations are not universally shared. Cultural expectations in Japan involve showing reserve, restraint, and a concern for maintaining privacy around strangers.

Japanese people are generally unresponsive to smiles from strangers Patterson et al. Eye contact provides another example. In the United States and Europe, eye contact with others typically signifies honesty and attention. However, most Latin-American, Asian, and African cultures interpret direct eye contact as rude, confrontational, and aggressive Pazain, Thus, someone who makes eye contact with you could be considered appropriate and respectful or brazen and offensive, depending on your culture [link].

Eye contact is one of many social gestures that vary from culture to culture. Hallucinations seeing or hearing things that are not physically present in Western societies is a violation of cultural expectations, and a person who reports such inner experiences is readily labeled as psychologically disordered. In other cultures, visions that, for example, pertain to future events may be regarded as normal experiences that are positively valued Bourguignon, Finally, it is important to recognize that cultural norms change over time: what might be considered typical in a society at one time may no longer be viewed this way later, similar to how fashion trends from one era may elicit quizzical looks decades later—imagine how a headband, legwarmers, and the big hair of the s would go over on your campus today.

In the s and s, the concept of mental illness was widely criticized. Further, most of the studies we reviewed involved pitting PHTs against no treatment at all, which is quite literally the weakest bar of comparison possible and one that could overstate the effectiveness of PHTs.

Most significantly, in our analysis, two interventions stood out as more likely to be harmful than helpful:. Critical incident stress debriefing , in which someone who has experienced an extremely stressful event like a paramedic or firefighter is required to participate in a small-group intervention shortly after the stressor.

Scared Straight programs, in which adolescents who have broken the law are exposed to inmates in actual prisons; the inmates attempt to scare them out of delinquency by describing the horrors of prison life. Unfortunately, both of these treatments are often touted by their developers, podcasts and TV shows. Drug abuse resistance education DARE is similarly well-promoted.

A program that most millennials and Gen Zers were or have been exposed to, DARE involves a uniformed police officer teaching students about the perils of drug use and drinking. DARE has had an operating budget in the millions and been deployed across the world. Resources devoted to it could have been spent on programs that actually benefited student learning and well-being. Our research suggests that being a provider or consumer of psychological interventions is tricky. Unlike the FDA for medications, medical devices and vaccines, there is no government body that judges psychological treatments as safe.

Therefore, those involved need to not only consider the potential for a psychotherapy to help, but also to harm. Making these considerations even more difficult, providers and consumers need to be aware that published research on the helpfulness and harmfulness of psychological interventions is not always credible. Mental health providers, meanwhile, could benefit from increasing their attention to the possibility of harm, while also learning to spot some of the more straightforward warning signs of in credible research.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. John Sakaluk is an assistant professor of social psychology at Western University.