Training and Education in Professional Psychology, Vol 16(4), Nov 2022, 333-340; doi:10.1037/tep0000386
Self-care has been described as a foundational competency to becoming an effective professional psychologist. Research on self-care during psychology training suggests that self-care is important for a sustainable career, general well-being, as an ethical imperative to avoid impairment and harm to the public and its emphasis during training is associated with improved quality of life. However, research also implicitly and explicitly suggests that self-care is the responsibility of the student to develop and practice and is generally not the focus of formal or even informal education. Thus, self-care in the context of psychology training is a contradiction. It is an explicit and implicit foundational training competency, yet it has no required coursework. Moreover, despite long-standing calls to create a culture of self-care to address this gap in training, the literature suggests the field has not significantly moved in that direction. The purpose of this manuscript is to highlight the importance of self-care as a competency-based training benchmark and address the obstacles to treating self-care as an important and valuable aspect of professional psychology training. The manuscript addresses the critical assumptions and contradictions in the literature and culture of health service psychology that serve as obstacles to integrating self-care into psychology training and poses several questions intended to advance self-care as a functional training competency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)