In her new book, Lessons from an Early Career Therapist: Managing Mistakes, Missteps, and Other Minor Disasters, released Oct. 8, clinical psychology professor Dana Ménard provides a guide for novice therapists and validation for those further along in the profession.

“Before I took on the professor job at the University of Windsor, I was a full time practising clinical psychologist for about eight years,” says Dr. Ménard. “So, the new book is about that phase of my life and my experiences in graduate school as well.”

As a clinician, Ménard worked at Detroit Receiving Hospital, the London Health Sciences Centre, the Royal Ottawa Hospital and the Ottawa Hospital, among others.

“My goal was to try to guide students better than I was guided myself,” she says. “There's a lot about sharing wisdom that I did not pick up from formal sources. For example, no one in grad school is ever going to tell you, ‘Go to the bathroom before your session,’ but it's very important to go to the bathroom before your session. There were also a lot of strange things that no one prepared me for, like having a possum get stuck in my office window well while I was seeing clients.”

Chapters take the reader through lessons related to grad school, the process of internship and licensure, practitioner self-care, client diversity, professionalism, and virtual care strategies, among others.

“It's all these little accumulated pieces of wisdom and hacks and things that I had to learn the hard way that I thought, OK, maybe there's a better way of doing this,” she says. “I’m sharing the tribulations and challenges of doing the work.

“For example, often clinical psychology books will present these therapist client dialogues that don’t occur in nature, where the therapist says the perfect thing and the client responds in the perfect way and everybody lives happily ever after.”

Ménard remembers reading those dialogues as a graduate student and feeling inadequate at the job. She felt she wasn’t getting these results because she didn’t sound like the therapist in the books.

“It turns out that nobody sounds like the people in the books,” she says. “The clients don’t sound like the people in the books, and the therapists don’t either. And that’s fine. That’s reality. I think it was important to share the messiness of the job, but also the joy.”

Ménard is the co-author with Peggy Kleinplatz of Magnificent Sex: Lessons from Extraordinary Lovers, which won the 2021 Consumer Book Award from the Society of Sex Therapy and Research.