IS THE gap closing between amateur and professional psychologists?

Working across the disciplines of discourse analysis and psychology, Professor Alec McHoul and Dr Mark Rapley from the Division of Social Sciences, Humanities and Education at Murdoch University are considering the overlap between scientific and everyday uses of psychological terms.

Their preliminary research suggests that professional psychology itself is based in little other than ordinary commonsense concepts of moral conduct. They believe its appeal is cemented in popular culture, mainly by the appropriation of pseudo-scientific terms such as ‘symptom’, ‘diagnosis’ and ‘syndrome’ from medicine.

Conversely, technical psychological terms like ‘depression’, ‘ADHD’ and ‘schizophrenic’ have now not only become a routine part of our everyday vocabulary but, perhaps in consequence, have also taken on lives of their own.

This makes the discipline of psychology quite unique.

“With the possible exception of medicine, it seems to be the easiest of the formal knowledges to transfer into the popular imagination,” said Dr Rapley.

“This may be because it draws its water from the very same well as mundane common knowledge.”

Dr Rapley and Professor McHoul’s research has approached this crossover from a number of fronts.

One project has involved showing how, far from being socially incompetent, people with intellectual disabilities can, and do, take control over professional assessors in clinical testing situations.

A further arm of the project has looked at the journalism and clinical reports surrounding the trial of Tasmanian mass-murderer Martin Bryant in 1996.

“In this case study, lay and professional accounts of the ‘psychological motives’ for the killings were shown to be mutually dependent. They differed only in the ‘sophistication’ of the language used,” said Professor McHoul.

The team is continuing its work in this field, analysing therapy sessions for people who ‘hear voices’ and the connections between psychological and ‘lay’ conceptions of racism and prejudice.

Future directions for the project will work on the popularisation of psychology in magazines, self-help books and on the Internet.

This project (called psych.com) will investigate the commercial exploitation and popularisation of clinical work in easily accessible formats.