A mental health professional is a health care practitioner who offers services for the purpose of improving an individual's mental health or to treat mental illness. This broad category includes psychiatrists (D.O. or M.D.), clinical psychologists (Psy.D or Ph.D.), clinical social workers (MSW or MSSW), psychiatric nurses, mental health counselors, professional counselors, pharmacists, as well as many other professionals. These professionals often deal with the same illnesses, disorders, conditions, and issues; however, their scope of practice differs. The most significant difference between mental health professionals are the laws regarding required education and training across the various professions.
Read more about Mental Health Professional: Psychiatrist, Clinical Psychologist, Counseling Psychologist or Psychotherapist, Behavior Analyst, Certified Mental Health Professional, School Psychologist, Social Worker, Psychiatric and Mental Health Nurse
Famous quotes containing the words mental health, mental, health and/or professional:
“All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysands to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defence. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Dining-out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.”
—Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)
“In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American—on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)