Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode 136: How to become a UK psychologist as a non-UK citizen

In this episode of the Aspiring Psychologist podcast, Dr. Marianne Trent interviews Ananya Mosur Sridhar, an assistant psychologist who is a non-UK citizen. They discuss the challenges and barriers that non-UK citizens face when pursuing a career in professional mental health in the UK. Ananya shares her journey from India to the UK, including her undergraduate studies and her decision to pursue a master's degree in clinical psychology at Newcastle University. She also talks about the difficulties she faced in securing an assistant psychologist role and the process of obtaining a skilled worker visa. Ananya highlights the importance of perseverance and self-care in avoiding burnout on the path to becoming a psychologist. She also discusses her interest in researching and challenging the diagnosis of emotionally unstable personality disorder. Overall, the episode provides valuable insights and advice for aspiring psychologists, especially those facing additional challenges as non-UK citizens.

The Highlights:

• 00:00 - Introduction
• 00:54 - Host Welcome
• 01:41 - Guest Greeting
• 03:50 - Undergraduate Studies
• 05:11 - Moving to the UK
• 06:38 - Challenges for International Students
• 08:41 - Landing an Assistant Psychologist Role
• 09:53 - Skilled Worker Visa
• 12:24 - Stability and Future Plans
• 14:39 - Perseverance and Values
• 18:36 - Mental Health in India
• 21:01 - Opportunities as an Assistant Psychologist
• 23:50 - Research and EUPD Focus
• 27:26 - Role of Crisis Teams
• 30:03 - Avoiding Burnout

Links:

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Getting started in a psychology career can be challenging at the best of times. But what if you've got additional challenges that you are a non-UK citizen? How can this make getting ahead in your career in professional mental health in the UK even more challenging? What skills does it require? What barriers come up that you need to find a way through? And how are you also trying to learn, develop, shape yourself and how at the same time of trying to navigate what it is to work in the uk, you are also learning, shaping, developing, and growing yourself professionally and personally. This is a brilliant episode, probably a long overdue one and I hope you'll find it really interesting.

Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I'm Dr. Marianne Trent and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. I am regularly contacted by people all over the world looking at how they can get started in a career in the uk. And I have to say, I often don't really know the answers, but after today I will know the answers and you will too. So I hope you'll find this a fascinating listen, even if you already have the right to work in the uk, there is so much beauty and brilliance to learn from our guest who is so thoughtful and I really, really enjoyed our chat. I hope you will too, and I'll catch you on the other side. I am so delighted to welcome you along to the podcast Ananya, thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me for this podcast. I've been listening to it for a long time now and I'm just so delighted to be here.

I'm so kind of you to say thank you. We connected on LinkedIn as I do with many of my podcast guests, and if you have been a listener to the podcast, you will realise that I do mention LinkedIn a lot and when I suggested an episode, you must've been like, oh, but you went with it and you were up for the challenge. So thank you for that.

Absolutely. I mean, I was thrilled when you'd sent a comment on my post and I was just telling all of my friends that, oh my gosh, I've gotten someone asking me to be interviewed on a podcast. Am I eligible for this? Have I actually done enough to be on a podcast? So yes, thank you so much for the opportunity

Though. Oh, you're so welcome. I think you have, because actually your post stopped me in my tracks because you are an assistant psychologist and I think that's a really fascinating conversation for us to have. But you aren't just doing assistant psychologist work within your paid assistance psychologist stuff. You are really looking at how you can maximise that for you, for your service, for your career. And actually that was my experience of being an assistant that if you're able to carve out time to do relevant extra bits that that's beneficial for you, but it is beneficial for the service too. I know from our pre podcast chat, there are really exciting additional reasons why I think this podcast chat is going to be really useful. You explained to me that actually you were born and raised in India and then you are now doing your psychology career to become a UK qualified professional psychologist. So I really think there's going to be so much for our audience to learn here. That's going to be really interesting. So yeah, let's dive in. Let's have a little bit of a think about, let's start with your undergrad. So where did you do your undergrad?

So I did my undergrad in Bangalore, India from Coast University, and it was a triple major in journalism, psychology and English literature. And I decided to pursue psychology after that. And I think I knew when I was during my university undergrad that I wanted to come to the uk. I wanted to do a master's in the uk and I sort of applied pretty much everywhere that I could think of. And I really liked the programme at Newcastle University where they offered an MSC in clinical psychology. So I enrolled and got through and I think there's sort of a sense of a pre UK and a post uk. I feel like that was a huge, huge change for me just from being away from home, being in a completely different country and just understanding how to deal with independence and how do you make the most of the time that you are away from home and also not feel homesick. So that's the academic journey that I've had so far.

Thank you. And I've got lots of friends in the northeast and I know them to be really friendly and really welcoming, but the accent is not always the easiest to get to grips with. And also

Absolutely

The weather it'ss kind of chilly up there. So it must've been for so many reasons, such a big cultural shock for you.

I struggled a bit during winter, but I was very excited to see snow because that was the first time that I was actually seeing snow for the first time. So that was very exciting. But I have to say what I enjoyed the most about Newcastle was the affordability and just how cheap everything was. And in fact, I really miss it now that I'm living in and everything is so expensive

And the Northumberland coast is really beautiful. I've only been there once, but I was just blown away and just very, very different to life in the Midlands.

Absolutely.

Okay. So assistant psychologist roles are very tricky to get, even if you are a UK national, there are so many more layers of complexity involved for people that do not have, there are so many more challenges involved for people that do not have indefinite leave to remain, aren't there?

Absolutely. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's so difficult for international students to actually get an assistant psychologist post. And you are absolutely right. It's difficult even for home students to get on, let alone international students. And I remember when I was working as a support worker, it took me about six months to make all of my applications and interviews, and I think I submitted about 57 applications and got about 15 interviews and I almost made the cut for four of them. In fact, the job that I'm in right now was actually sort of the last one that I'd applied for. And I was very close to giving up on the dream of psychology in the UK because I was just in a period where I thought, this is just not happening. Everything sort of stacked against me and it was quite a dramatic reveal for me at the end because when my supervisor initially called me, she said, well, you are sort of on a reserve list.

There are two posts. One person has accepted the other person and we'll let you know in a week's time. And I didn't really hear from her for a while, so I just assumed I hadn't gotten it. And I got a call from her about a week and a half later and I was expecting bad news, but she said, yeah, the job's yours. And I just didn't know how, I mean, I just didn't know what to feel and how to respond to it and just feel like I've actually done this, that I've actually gotten an assistant psychologist post. So it was quite surreal and I think ever since I've just felt like this role is what I've trained for till now I'm finally using the knowledge and skills and just my abilities to the full extent really

And well done to you. These jobs are not easy to get. Even when we're looking at doctoral psychology places, there's often sometimes as many as 40, 50 places on a course, whereas for an assistant psychologist, sometimes there's only one job and so you need to be the best person to get the job, whereas there's a little bit more flexibility. Even getting doctoral places is tricky, but there's a little more flexibility when there's only one job. So you originally came over on a student visa, can you work on a student visa because you guide us through that process.

So there is some sort of leeway to work. You can work for a certain number of hours that's stipulated within your visa. So it's sort of part-time work that you can do whilst you're studying and after your term ends and you finish your course, then you can work. And it was after this student visa that I had applied for a post-study visa, which lasted for two years, and that was the visa that I was on when I was working as a support worker.

Okay, that's really good to know. But I know that your current supervisor helped support your application to get a longer term working visa as well. What type of visa is that called?

So that's the skilled worker visa, and that's the sort of very tricky one to get, especially as an international student who's applying for an assistant psychologist post where it can be filled by any home student really. So my manager had to really push for it and fight for it, and I don't think I can express my gratitude enough for her to actually have seen so much value in my work and really want to keep me in the service and continue working here.

And I think you've absolutely said it yourself. They must have really seen just how unique, special, gifted, talented and how for this profession you were and what an asset you were going to be to your current clients and your future clients and that actually to lose you from the UK mental health workforce would be detrimental. So we want to keep you.

Yeah, yeah. I think I still remember the day when my supervisor came to me to say that she had good news and we both just broke down in the office.

So does she get told before you do that your application has been successful?

So there's a process where we need to, through the leadership team, they need to secure funds for it. So once that's secured, the application pretty much goes through. So she sort of came to me to say, oh yes, we've secured the funds and we both just broke down at that point.

So that's funds for the role specifically. So it's a fixed term contract or is that something unique and different with being a non-UK citizen? Sorry if that's a really weird question.

No, so the funds are for the Visa itself, I'm on a permanent contract in my current role. So the funds are for the duration of the visa itself.

I see, okay. So it's basically, I guess the UK government's assertion and guarantee that you are going to be employed for the duration of as long as it takes basically.

Exactly. Yeah,

Yeah. But it's good for you as well. Does that mean then that you can essentially buy property, you can put down roots in this country, would that feel a bit premature at this stage?

I think it's a bit early for that. I still need to get indefinitely to remain before any of that can happen, but it just gives me a lot more stability around work and knowing that I won't be kicked out of the country and have to go back home.

Yeah, that's so good. So can you move to a different assistant psychologist role for example, or are you now kind of wedded to this one role? How does that work?

So the sponsorship is through Oxford Health, so I could change AP roles within the trust, but if I do have to move trust then I'd have to get the new trust to sponsor me as well, which would be a whole other different thing.

So we're looking ultimately for assistant psychologist roles in Oxford, so if anyone knows of any do let Ananya know, not that you're looking to move on because I understand that actually what caught my eyes, you were celebrating your year of having been an assistant psychologist and by the time this episode comes out, it'll probably be coming up for 18 months actually because taken us a little while to get this in the diary. So yeah, well done to you. What I know from being a qualified psychologist myself, but also from my work with aspiring psychologists and putting together the Clinical Psychologist collective and the Aspiring Psychologist collective book is that perseverance is key and that what we know is that people who do have the capacity, the tenacity and the grit to persevere are more likely to get there. And that sounds really silly. It absolutely does. But if at any point we put our shovel and our work boots down, that then means we're not going to progress. Certainly we're not going to progress at that time. And it's being able to keep going on a journey that feels like there might be no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There are no guarantees that can feel really tricky, can't it? And actually sometimes people do burn out from that process. How did you keep the faith in Anya?

Honestly, that's a bit of a tricky question. I think it's sort of a two-pronged answer if I could say. I recently did an exercise that we actually do with our patients or myself because it's actually a very lovely exercise to try out. It's called the Values Card Sort intervention, and it basically helps you go through certain values and helps you decide what your top three values are. It can be quite tricky to choose a top three, but the three that came out for me was around ambition, knowledge and hard work. And I think that sort of resonated so much with me to sort of reflect on the last five years and just everything that's happened, it's so centred around these three aspects of myself. And I think the other aspect of it is just how supportive my parents have been. And I come from a family that's extremely supportive around the kind of work that I do because mental health and psychology is not really considered very positively in India just as of yet. Things aren't changing but changing quite slowly. So I'm extremely grateful for my parents to have sort of kept that faith in me and the career that I've chosen. And yeah, I think it's definitely a combination of those two things.

Thank you. What a beautiful answer. Beautiful answer. Yeah, I travelled just before I got on the doctorate, so once I knew I had my doctorate place, I travelled in India for five weeks and I definitely did see that some of the people that would've been looked after or perhaps even in inpatient facilities in the UK were not at points. It felt a little bit like some of the people who had acute needs. It almost felt like it's going to sound really awful. But in days gone by in the uk, there were court fools in kind of royal settings where people would be brought in to kind of do something funny, to make people laugh. And at times some of the people that I felt would be service users in the UK almost had that aspect in society where people were standing around laughing at them and that was really hard to watch. And so almost you seeing experiences like that in India and knowing that you didn't want that to be the case and you wanted to further a career in professional mental health care, talk us through that.

Yeah, I think just from what you've shared about your experience with India, I think you see a lot of that in smaller cities, smaller areas, but things I think are changing quite rapidly in the bigger metropolitan cities in India. People are accessing therapy, especially people from Gen Z and people are more therapy at this point, which is really good. But I think the issue is that it's a only a small proportion of the population that recognises the importance of mental health and the need to access mental health care. And I know there are a few mental health warts in Ninja as well, but obviously they're not as those that we see in the uk and that's something that needs to be worked on. And there's probably no concept of a crisis team back in India I think. So there's definitely a long, long way to go.

But going back to your question around how and why psychology came up for me, I think this goes back to when I was in school in India, I was in high school and that was when I first had psychology as a subject, and I had the most amazing teacher who just made me fall in love with the subject. And if I wouldn't have had her as sort of a guide for me, I don't think I would've fallen in love with the subject. And it was something that came so naturally to me that I felt that I could ace examinations without really having to study much. And I spent a lot of time reading things outside my syllabus and just wanting to know more and just get to understand things. And I think that continued during my undergraduate degree as well, where I used to do a lot of work outside of the premeditate syllabus and I did sort of a research project which subsequently got published. And I sort of had this idea in my head where I would say that by 18, by the time I'm 18 years old, I want to make sure that I am a co-author and by the time I'm 25, I want to be a first author, which I did achieve. I published my master's dissertation just in time.

But yeah, the next step in the aligned goals is to get onto the doctorate by the time I'm 30. So fingers crossed, hopefully that does happen.

Yeah, fingers crossed indeed. And so at the moment, that would be courses that offer self-funding for the doctorate, is that right?

Yeah, so I'm hoping by the time I'm 30 I should be able to apply for the NHS funded courses as well.

I see. So you're hoping sometime in the next five years you get the indefinite leave to remain?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, amazing. Alright, so tell us about some of the incredible opportunities. Obviously without sharing any client identifiable information, but some of the incredible opportunities that an assistant psychologist role affords to individuals.

I think when you first start as an assistant psychologist, you are sort of at the absolute precipice of opportunities. You don't realise how much there is to do and how much there is to learn out there. It can be quite intimidating initially, and especially for someone like me who just likes to keep doing and doing a lot of work, it can be quite overwhelming. My supervisor always says I need to learn how to say no and stop putting too much on myself. But I think from the start I've sort of known that I wanted to get involved in research and I wanted to get involved in more leadership roles as well. And I've had conversations with my supervisor around the core competencies of what it takes to become a clinical psychologist. And that's sort of the whole point of an assistant psychologist post where you work on honing those skills.

So you've got clinical research leadership and within the clinical work, I think starting out as an assistant psychologist in a crisis team has been absolutely phenomenal. Just being able to work alongside service users who have such high risk to themselves, to others. And also I feel like the more crisis work I do, the more I realise that I thrive the most in high risk environments, I find it a lot more challenging, but also as rewarding as they are challenging. So with respect to clinical work, I've seen how much I've changed just in the last year and how confident I've become in using the interventions that we do with service users. And we use a lot of CFT and DBT interventions, so compassion focused therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy skills, and also working in a crisis team, you realise that it's not a very long-term support that's out there. So having psychology embedded within a crisis team is important within itself. In fact, I'm one of the first assistant psychologists within the team, so I had to sort of start from scratch to work with my supervisor to get a sense of what the role will look like and what does psychology input within a crisis team, what does that look like as well. So while we don't get to do long-term work with patients, we do have short-term interventions that we provide, which is quite exciting.

But on the other hand, I've also been involved in a lot of research that I'd like to use to help the team understand team dynamics and working with certain patient populations. Ever since I worked as a support worker, I've been interested in understanding more about patients who've been diagnosed with the emotionally unstable personality disorder. I think I can use an entire hour just to talk about the disorder and why I'm so against it. I'm a huge feminist and I feel like this particular diagnosis is quite a stigmatised one, which is used more often than not towards women. And in fact, I want to work on this topic for my doctorate as well, which is why I feel this is sort of my stepping stone towards that dream.

Maybe we'll talk about that for a separate episode. Maybe we'll get that booked in for Autumn and beyond. Yeah, well done.

Yeah, definitely.

Well done. It sounds like you're doing incredible things, but it also made me think about service that I learned about recently, which is actually only available in Wales currently. So if you're listening to this in Wales, you might already know about this, but it's called One Option Two. And in Wales that is a mental health crisis line really that we use in the same way for physical health stuff in England, should I say, and England and Scotland. But in Wales, there's one more one option too that you can do all sorts there. So you can phone up and say, I've run out of medication, what on earth do I do? Or you can say, actually, I'm really not coping very well. I need a referral to so and so team, or I actually think I need the crisis team. And they kind of help you do all of that.

So if anyone's listening to this and thinking, oh, I live in Wales or near Wales, I'm looking for relevant roles, they tend to be based within CMHT teams and there's a couple of people working for one option two, so that might well be interesting for people. But the work that crisis teams do is very specialist, because what it is is, like you said, it's acute cases of presentation, which I don't mind telling you that when I was an assistant psychologist interview for an acute inpatient service, one of the questions was, can you tell us what acute is and how that work might differ to a non-acute service? And it probably would've been really excellent for me to have properly looked into what the word acute meant, and I just sort of went, Ooh, really bad. Oh no. So yes, do always make sure that you probably understand the terms for the roles that you've been invited to because acute means it's kind of something that's happening right now that maybe has happened before, maybe is kind of first onset that someone might not have the skills for how to deal with and it's disrupting all elements of their life, and we need to get involved.

We need to get involved now to contain, to diffuse, to help people make changes that are hopefully going to make a difference. Is that a better answer? If someone asks me what acute is, how would you rate that answer?

Oh yeah. There's definitely a lot more than not good. But yeah, it's about the intensity of work that we do as well that is needed for clients with acute presentations. And another aspect of crisis service that people often forget is that it's there to ensure that people can be supported in the community rather than going to hospital.

Yeah, excellent points between us, we've got a gold standard answer there I think. So we are drawing to a close with our episode today. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you, and I think this is going to be an invaluable episode for anybody looking to get an assistant psychologist role, but especially for those who might have additional challenges linked to Visa or non residency. How has the episode been for you? And of course, if you can think of anything, what advice might you have for any aspiring psychologists to avoid burnout on the way to where they're going?

Yeah, I think the episodes been quite emotional for me, if I can say So. It's sort of made me realise how far I actually have come, and it's been a while since I sat down and thought about, and I know from 2020 and how much everything's changed since then. I think the only sort of advice I'd give to avoid burnout is to, I don't know, try and prioritise yourself as much as it might feel selfish or difficult to do it or just you might feel that it's an indulgent thing. But this's something that my clinical leads and my supervisor keeps saying that you can't pour out of an empty cup. So really the only way I've sort of kept myself to not burn out is by convincing myself that if I take a few days off when I come back, I'm going to do a better job. So just have that little nugget there for you to convince you that you do need to take time off to take care of yourself and also just practise what you preach, especially as mental health professionals working with patients who are going through very difficult homes. You are out there telling them you need to be kind to yourself, but sometimes as professionals, we need to be kind to ourselves as well.

We absolutely do. And everybody should reach for some kind of education on compassion focus therapy, I think. And if you're like, I don't want to just listen to my podcast, it is filled with compassion. I did a post on LinkedIn yesterday about our younger selves actually and what they might be proud of. So it's really nice to kind of have that resonated throughout today's episode as well. But my post was that actually the first time I was ever on tv, I was 17 and it was in an audience for watching a TV show being recorded with a lady called Tricia Godard. And actually in the last six months, I've been on the Tricia Godard show as a guest three times and 17-year-old Marianne. She'd have been absolutely thrilled with that. So yeah, it's really important to think about where we've come from as well as where we're going to, and don't forget to be really give ourselves some pats on the back for that hard work and that progress. It's really important message. Well done in Anya.

Definitely.

Thank you so much for your time today. I will be watching your career with keen Interest, and if you would like to do an episode on the quite contentious diagnosis these days of EUPD, then let's get that in the diary. Thank you for your time.

Thank you so much for having me here, Dr. Marianne, and absolutely, yes, we'll definitely get in touch with you for another episode. I think it's going to be an interesting one.

Perfect. Thank you so much for your time, and I hope you have a lovely summer.

Thank you.

Oh, what an absolute privilege it was to speak with Ananya. I really, really valued our chat, and I hope you did too. She's absolutely reflecting in action. She's reflecting on action. She's doing all of those good things. She's just growing by the minute. You can almost see it. I would love to know what you think. What do you think of this episode? Has this ignited thoughts, feelings, questions for you? Do come and let me know in the Aspiring Psychologist Community Free Facebook Group, which is also the exclusive home of Marianne's mindset and Motivation sessions, which happen on Friday morning, please do come along and join the group. If you like this episode, then I think you'll like What Ananya said was one of her favourite episodes, and that was with the lovely Phil Pampoulov, who is an end stage trainee clinical psychologist. I recently saw that he'd just submitted his thesis, so well done to you, Phil, and the episodes that she particularly liked was the Reflective Growth across a Psychology career.

So if you haven't yet listened or watched that one, please do because I think you'll really like that too. I did mention the Aspiring Psychologist Collective book and the Clinical Psychologist Collective book in today's episode. If you haven't checked those out, please do. The reviews are beautiful. If you've read those books and haven't left me a review, please do because it helps us to demonstrate that they are worth reading. Please, if you haven't left us a review on Apple Podcasts and a Rating five Stars would be lovely on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please do because it just takes a moment and it is the kindest thing you can do. Absolutely. For free to help me know that you like the content that I create, welcome some further nurturance and guidance. The Aspiring Psychologist membership is available to you. I'm currently in the stages of doing a website redesign, so who knows, by the time this episode comes out, it might be on its shiny new home. You won't be able to miss it on socials. I'll be talking about that everywhere. So do come and follow me on socials where I am, Dr. Marianne Trent, everywhere you could hope to imagine. Thank you so much for being part of my world. Be kind to yourself. Let me know if you've got any future topic ideas for episodes. I'll see you very soon. The next episode will be along on YouTube from 10:00 AM on Saturdays and wherever you get your podcasts from. 6:00 AM on Monday.

Take care. If you're looking to become a psychologist, then let the psychologist podcast.