Why Clinical Psychology?

Why Clinical Psychology?

A Closer Look At The How and Why of My Academic Journey

I witnessed the need for clinical counsel at an early age. My community preferred Rabbis and spiritual guides called mashpi’im over professional psychological or psychiatric help. For instances where the illness was obvious and inescapable, exceptions were made. However, more often than not by the time medical help was sought, it was very late and sometimes too late. Discussion about mental health was scarce if at all, yet suicide in the Hasidic community did happen, and sadly, far more than it had to. Those who did not end their lives often lived in unbearable pain on a day-to-day basis. Much less common were those that thrived albeit their struggle, though for the most part they contended with their illness alone and in secrecy for fear of being outed as one of the “crazy ones.” 

I remember wondering why my high school never had a school counselor. True, it was an ultra-orthodox Yeshiva, but the girls' schools in our community all had social workers on staff. With time, my awareness of the need for good clinicians in the behavioral health field grew and I knew that I wanted to help fill the need. As a teenager, I would often dream about finishing the Yeshiva educational system and getting the education necessary to become a clinical psychologist. What I did not realize at the time, was the immense educational disadvantage that I carried with me as a result of growing up in an extremely insulated and isolated community. 

I recall the deep shame that I felt when attempting to solve basic addition and subtraction problems at the age of twenty-two. A contingency for enrolling into the local high school equivalency program was to take an evaluation quiz so that they could place you at the proper level. I remember pleading with the director, asking to not have to take this quiz. She gave me the lowest level quiz they had and I shamefully returned it with some guesses and lots of questions left blank. It took some time to come back and get started with the program but soon enough I did. Five months of inexplicable hardship, frustration, and scattered hints of hope and I gathered the courage to take the exam. The results finally came back. I was truly shocked and confused. I passed all five sections of the test but a part of me felt like this was not supposed to happen. Many of my friends from Yeshiva tried getting started with their high school diplomas but dropped out after encountering the math requirement. There was an additional persistence needed to push past the newness to numbers. This, and a certain kind of courage, almost audacity, was required to begin learning basic math among others who have already been exposed to such material in their formative years. Though genuinely perplexed by the results, the five green checks on the TASC/GED online portal seemed to be yelling at me, “Wake up! You did it! You have forced an initial dent into the cycle of poverty and lack of education, don’t lose sight of that teenage dream of yours…”

In the back of my mind lingered an image of a path forward. During my later years in Yeshiva, I made a conscious effort to expand my English vocabulary and read more non-Hebrew books. Although it was somewhat illegal for the boys in Yeshiva to have a smartphone at the time, I would browse through the books app on my iPhone and read books that I found interesting. In this process, I came upon a heartfelt and moving memoir called “Cut me loose: sin and salvation after my ultra-Orthodox girlhood”. Leah Vincent’s story resonated with me in many ways but also left me with an idea that would eventually come to fruition. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree at Brooklyn College, Leah proceeded to earn her master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University. I remember thinking to myself that if Leah was able to transfer from Brooklyn College to Harvard University, Brooklyn College must be a quality institution. I therefore concluded that if possible, I’d like to follow a similar educational path and begin my college journey at Brooklyn College like Leah did. 

With the progress that I have made, I was still rather intimidated by the idea of registering at a senior college where most of the students had “proper” high school diplomas. It would take a final push for me to make a definitive decision on the matter. Another book titled “An Unquiet Mind” by Kay Redfield Jamison was recommended to me by a mental health practitioner that I very much admired. The copy that I purchased was a second edition and had an additional introduction from the author where she discussed how the first edition was received following its publication. The following passage struck me in a profound way and left me with a message that I still carry with me today.

The most lasting impressions on me after writing my book were of pain, however. Evening after evening, following my book signings, people would show me a photograph of a child, parent, or spouse who had committed suicide as a result of depression or bipolar illness. I had nearly died from suicide myself, had studied suicide and the illnesses most closely related to it for years, and had lost many friends and colleagues to it. Yet I was unprepared for the raw pain experienced by those left behind; I had not begun to fathom the sheer numbers of those devastated by the loss, guilt, and confusion that suicide generates. 

After reading this passage, one thought kept reverberating in my mind; if you could save one individual or one family from having to endure the pain that accompanies mental illness and death by suicide - it would be worth all of the hard work and training required to be in a position where you can make a difference. It was with this thought that I set out to get my bachelor’s degree at Brooklyn College, and often when struggling with the academic and career path I have chosen, I refer back to that thought and passage…