Self-care as a competency benchmark: Creating a culture of shared responsibility.

Abstract

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. Public Significance StatementSelf-care is critical to the health and well-being of psychology graduate students and professionals and serves as a foundational training competency that students must develop. Despite research suggesting students and professional psychologists struggle to become competent at self-care, there is no required training or coursework related to self-care. Graduate programs should begin to take responsibility for student self-care by providing training and support that helps students develop their ability to engage in self-care throughout the course of their careers.

Your self-care is made of capitalism: A decolonial approach to self and community care.

“…Similar to how the practice of coloniality has sanitized and removed the religious and cultural meaning of specific ancient practices in service of the status quo, so has self-care been stripped of its political roots (Spicer, 2019). Professional psychology training, which focuses the most on self-care out of all psychology subspecialties, implicitly and explicitly suggests that selfcare is an individual imperative and responsibility of the student (Callahan & Watkins, 2018;Miller, 2022;Pakenham, 2015). Despite cultural expectations that psychologists take good care of themselves for the ethical protection of the public, as well as specific self-care training benchmarks, self-care is still treated as an individual responsibility.…”