PS380 Unit 2 History of Clinical Psychology Paper Example

From Witmer's Clinic to an Iron Range Waiting Room: A PS380 Unit 2 History of Clinical Psychology Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS380: Clinical Psychology

Unit 2 History of Clinical Psychology Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The clinic, its staff and the 1952 manual on the shelf are composite details; the historical sources cited are real.

A Book on the Shelf

On a shelf in Dr. Lund's office at our Iron Range clinic sits a worn copy of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, published in 1952 and donated by a retired psychiatrist. It is about 130 pages long. The current edition runs to more than a thousand. That shelf is a good place to start a history of clinical psychology, because almost everything about how our clinic works, from the children tested on Mondays to the diagnosis codes on its bills, has a history behind it.

This paper traces four turning points: the first psychological clinic, the expansion of the field after World War II, the Boulder model of training and the first DSM. For each, it asks what remains in clinical practice today.

Witmer and the First Clinic

In 1896, Lightner Witmer, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, opened a clinic to help a schoolteacher with a student who struggled with spelling. The clinic grew into a service for children with learning and behavior problems, referred by schools and parents. In 1907 Witmer founded a journal, The Psychological Clinic, and in its first issue named the new field. He defined clinical psychology broadly, as the study of individuals by observation or experiment with the intention of promoting change, and he insisted that the method mattered more than the setting (Witmer, 1907).

Witmer's clinic did not look like modern psychotherapy. It assessed children, recommended changes at school and home, and worked with teachers and physicians. His emphasis on individual assessment and on collaboration with schools survives most clearly in testing. Every Monday, Dr. Lund assesses children referred by the local school district for attention and learning problems, which is close to the work Witmer began. The children are different, the tests are standardized, and the reports go into an electronic record, but the referral path is one Witmer would recognize.

Clinical psychology began not with therapy but with testing a child who could not spell, and that origin still fills a rural psychologist's Mondays.

For several decades after Witmer, clinical psychologists were mainly testers. Psychiatrists, who were physicians, provided most treatment for mental illness, often in large state hospitals. Psychologists gave intelligence and personality tests and reported the results.

War and Expansion

World War II changed the field. The armed forces needed to screen millions of recruits and treat soldiers with psychological injuries, and psychologists took on both tasks. After the war, the Veterans Administration faced tens of thousands of veterans needing mental health care and too few psychiatrists to provide it. It began funding training for clinical psychologists, and support followed from the National Institute of Mental Health, authorized by Congress in 1946. Clinical psychology grew from a small testing specialty into a profession that provided therapy.

That expansion explains why psychologists now do therapy at all, and why the VA remains one of the largest employers of psychologists. It also created a question that the next turning point tried to answer: how should a new generation of clinical psychologists be trained?

The Boulder Model

In 1949, a conference in Boulder, Colorado, brought together psychologists and funders to set training standards. Its report endorsed the scientist-practitioner model, under which every clinical psychologist would learn to do research and to treat patients, completing a doctorate in psychology with a supervised internship (Raimy, 1950). The idea was that practitioners trained in science would test their methods, and researchers trained in practice would study real problems.

The model has been criticized from the beginning. Many graduates practiced and never did research, and in 1973 the Vail conference endorsed a practitioner-scholar model and the PsyD degree for students focused on practice. Dr. Lund holds a PsyD. Even so, the Boulder ideal shapes her work. Research is something she consumes rather than produces: she follows it, picks treatments by it and measures her clients' progress with standardized scales, a small version of what the Boulder conference hoped every clinician would do.

The First DSM

The American Psychiatric Association published the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1952 (American Psychiatric Association, 1952). It grew partly out of a classification developed by the Army during the war, and its descriptions were brief paragraphs rather than lists of criteria. Many disorders were called reactions, as in schizophrenic reaction, reflecting Adolf Meyer's view that mental disorders were responses of the whole person to life circumstances.

Textbooks often describe DSM-I as a psychoanalytic document that clinicians mostly ignored. Cooper and Blashfield (2016) challenged that account. They argued that its influences were broader than psychoanalysis, especially Meyer's psychobiology, and that it was widely adopted and reprinted many times, making it more successful than its reputation suggests. Their re-evaluation is a reminder that history is also revised.

The change that mattered most for today's practice came later. DSM-III in 1980 replaced descriptive paragraphs with explicit criteria, which made diagnoses more reliable and made them central to insurance billing. The diagnosis codes on Dr. Lund's billing forms descend from that shift. The worn copy of DSM-I on her shelf shows how different diagnosis looked before it.

What Remains

It helps to imagine the clinic without each of these turning points. Without Witmer, psychologists might never have taken on school referrals, and the children Dr. Lund tests would wait months longer for a psychiatrist. Without the postwar expansion, the clinic's therapy would be provided almost entirely by other professions. Without the Boulder ideal, nobody would expect her to read the research. Without the DSM, there would be no shared language for diagnosis, and no basis for most of the clinic's income.

Each turning point left something in our clinic. Witmer's clinic left the school referral and the focus on individual assessment. The postwar expansion made therapy part of the psychologist's job and tied the profession to public funding. The Boulder model left an expectation, imperfectly met, that practice should rest on research. The first DSM began a system of classification that, after many revisions, now determines what clinicians diagnose and how they are paid.

Conclusion

Clinical psychology's history is not just a sequence of dates. It explains why a psychologist in a small Minnesota town spends her Mondays testing children, why she chooses treatments by reading research and why her billing depends on a manual whose first edition sits on her shelf. Knowing the history makes those features of practice look less like rules and more like choices that could be made differently.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (1952). Diagnostic and statistical manual: Mental disorders. American Psychiatric Association.

Cooper, R., & Blashfield, R. K. (2016). Re-evaluating DSM-I. Psychological Medicine, 46(3), 449-456. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291715002093

Raimy, V. C. (Ed.). (1950). Training in clinical psychology. Prentice-Hall.

Witmer, L. (1907). Clinical psychology. The Psychological Clinic, 1(1), 1-9.