what exactly are the qualifications you need to become a clinical psychologist?
Well a clinical psychologist needs any number of things. An MSW (master of social work - basically you are a therapist)
Master of Psychology
Doctor of psychology
These are to become a psychologist. Now as a psychologist you can not prescribe medication, because you are not a medical doctor. This is currently changing but dredfully slow
A Psychiatrist is a medical doctor who went through medical school. A psychologist does not go through med-school.
I am a psychologist. But not a clinical psychologist. I do not give therapy. I am an Environmental psychologist. I happen to be an instructor at a small liberal arts college. But Environmental psychology is the study of humans in their habitate and work environs. Basically we work with architects in design.
A psychiatrist is a person trained in medicine. Because psychiatrists are not trained in psychology, their approach to concerns of the mind is overwhelmingly medical-model, and reductionistically so.
For a variety of reasons, most of them bound up in the politics of convenience, money, and power, the primary social authority for addressing disruptions caused by mental conditions is vested in psychiatrists, including the power to impose treatment involuntarily and the power to detain and incarcerate involuntarily.
Psychology is not exactly a panacea nurtured by the open flow of interdisciplinary concepts and approaches to these issues, either, but in general, as a field, psychology is at least inclined to perceive a subject as a creature with thoughts and intentions, which is IMHO a significant step up from seeing the subject as a matrix of synapses and neurotransmitters that either is or is not in need of chemical modification.
An ideal approach would have to meld anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine (more neurology endocrinology and nutrition, through, rather than psychiatry), and the whole business of imposing involuntary incarceration and treatment should be rethought with a very clearly defined standard and judicial process for doing so if it is to be done at all.