PhD Discussion Forum

I'm not sure if anybody will know the answer to this, but here goes. I was awarded my PhD in December and I was fortunate enough to step straight into a postdoc. My broad area is peace and conflict studies, and my special areas of interest are youth participation in political violence and reconciliation, the cultural memory of violence, and the application of linguistics to peace and conflict studies. My background is literature, language, and anthropology, and I also worked for a children's NGO in a conflict zone.

I've always been really interested in psychotherapy and/or speech and language pathology, and I'm thinking of taking a clinical qualification in either of these disciplines so that I can expand the scope of my research and have more opportunities in the humanitarian field. However, I'd have to fund the training myself (and it's expensive!) and I'm worried that if I leave academia even for the time it would take to qualify, I'd find the door shutting in my face and future employers questioning my motivation. I'd love to do research on post-conflict rehabilitation/social participation of people with communication impairments, but I'm unsure if I could do that on the strength of a license to practise in speech and language therapy and my existing research background - am I likely to have to do a whole second PhD in SLT, do you think?