I am often asked how a clinical psychologist differs from an ordinary psychologist? What is his job? I’ll try to explain. A clinical psychologist, in addition to basic psychological education, additionally studies psychiatry, neurology, psychopharmacology, neuropsychology, pathopsychology, personality disorders, psychology of deviant behavior, addiction and many other subjects. Why do I describe the disciplines I study in such detail? – because it is important to see the causes and consequences of diseases and deviations beyond the boundaries of narrow specialization. The minimum training period for a clinical psychologist is one year. The maximum is a lifetime. Also, training involves practical training in a psychiatric hospital. For example, with my fellow students, every week I attended the examination of patients, the conduct of a pathopsychological experiment, and our homework was to independently write a conclusion based on the examination results. We learned to separate normality from pathology. We learned to distinguish healthy, intact parts of the personality from the damaged ones. After all, this is a resource necessary for the correction and adaptation of a person in society! What is the direct work of a clinical psychologist? Using special techniques, the patient’s memory, attention, thinking and intelligence are examined. After all, each cluster of mental disorders is characterized by its own specific disorders. For example, in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, thinking will always be impaired to some extent, but attention and intelligence will be preserved. For organic disorders (traumatic brain injury, epilepsy), on the contrary, thinking will be preserved, but memory and attention will be impaired. This is the main work of a clinical psychologist: to conduct a pathopsychological experiment and write a conclusion about the state of higher mental functions. And the psychiatrist, based on this conclusion, makes final conclusions about the state of the person’s psyche. After all, the same symptom can be characteristic of different mental disorders. And pathodiagnosis allows you to determine an accurate diagnosis. To summarize the above, we can say that a clinical psychologist is an assistant to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist treats with pills, and the clinical psychologist helps, from the side of preserved mental functions, to find the right approach to the patient and help him return to society and/or adapt to life.