What Is Clinical Case Supervision For Psychologists?
The world of psychology and mental health in general is based on knowledge of all kinds, both theoretical and practical, and it is part of what makes this field of work fascinating.
However, this also means that, from the point of view of professionals, doubts and obstacles can always arise in the face of which it is difficult to know what to do. Especially in the area of psychotherapy, encountering new situations or unexpected problems is common.
That is precisely why it exists supervision for psychologists, a very common service among professionals or teams of highly experienced psychologists who combine their usual tasks with help sessions for other colleagues. Here we will see what they consist of.
The supervision of clinical cases, as the name indicates, are processes in which a professional of psychological intervention in patients advises another to help them direct a specific case that they are dealing with in their consultation.
These supervision sessions They can be carried out punctually (in a single session) or with a certain periodicity to track a case over the days. On the other hand, it is often possible to do it not only face to face, but also online.
This is not an improvised service, but many psychologists have already developed a specific way of offering this service to colleagues, so that they have the necessary experience and preparation to help whoever needs it.
The answer to this question is no: Any professional, regardless of their level of experience, may on certain occasions need the supervision of other psychologists to know how to manage a specific case. Ultimately, psychotherapy is such a complex process that no one has complete control over what happens in it (for better and for worse), which means there is always room to learn.
Furthermore, sometimes the problem is not the lack of theoretical-practical knowledge, but the need to have an external agent that is capable of analyzing in a more objective way how the therapeutic bond has been developing.
Objectives of supervision for psychologists
The main objectives of supervising clinical cases in psychology are the following.
1. Resolve doubts
Especially at the beginning of intervention processes in the clinical setting, as well as in the evaluation phases of the progress made by the patient, Some psychotherapists have specific doubts that they do not know how to resolve on their own, referring to very specific gaps in knowledge We must not forget that a lot of information related to mental health research is published every year, and searching through these publications is not always easy.
Therefore, the possibility of asking questions directly to those who have been dedicating themselves to psychological therapy for years has great value, because it saves a lot of time and also allows us to have a global vision of the matter, in which irrelevant information has already been filtered and discarded. , showing above all what is most useful.
One of the most common reasons why psychotherapists resort to case supervision has to do with the need to advance therapeutic processes in which very significant improvements are not seen. Thus It is about directing the intervention by focusing on the achievement of concrete and objective goals
3. Enhance therapeutic skills
Supervision for psychologists also helps polish therapeutic skills that are not always explained in books: The so-called “soft skills” have proven to play a relevant role in helping patients and connecting better with them and they can be trained more easily if there is a real person monitoring the way the professional who seeks to be supervised behaves.
4. Share resources and strategies
We must not forget that the supervision of clinical cases is carried out through direct communication of professionals who exchange information; This means that the most up-to-date knowledge and resources can be disseminated in a more agile way, without the (relative) rigidity of searching and reading articles in specialized journals, completing postgraduate degrees, etc
One of the advantages of this is that, upon perceiving specific problems or needs that the person seeking supervision does not know very well how to approach, the supervisor can propose, on his or her own initiative, solutions that the other person had not considered before, due to because the relationship is symmetrical. This is something that occurs less frequently in rather asymmetrical interactions, such as master classes in a university degree or a Master’s degree.
In short, clinical case supervision sessions are a means by which knowledge travels spontaneously, responding to specific needs at the moment they are recognized as such.
5. Helps put the therapeutic relationship in perspective
Finally, another advantage of this type of services is that they help detect problems related to the therapeutic relationship with specific patients. This is, phenomena that are born and die over the course of psychotherapy and about which there is and cannot be anything published but they also provide a lot of relevant information that must be used to achieve therapeutic objectives and establish a climate of honesty, trust and harmony.
