Prelicensed therapists and counselors face a difficult road. Getting to licensure is a long and expensive process, so much so that even many well-qualified people drop out.
All of us here at Psychotherapy Notes want to make your path to licensure a little easier. So we’ve collected resources here that can help you along the way. You may already be familiar with some, but hopefully some are new and useful to you. Here are some essential resources for prelicensed therapists.
The Healthy California Act — California’s single-payer bill — continues to make progress through the state legislature. If signed into law, it would make California the first state to have a statewide single-payer health care system, even as the federal Affordable Care Act may be scaled back. How would single-payer health care impact therapists, counselors, and related mental health providers?
Here, I’ll do a quick review of what we know so far. It’s broken down into three questions providers rightly ask about the bill: How would it impact my client load? How would it impact my rates? And, How would it impact how I run my practice?
Becoming a therapist isn’t the only way you can put a psychology or counseling degree to work. You can also become a “life coach,” a growing profession that involves helping people come closer to reaching their life goals. Some clients who would resist going to therapy will happily visit with a life coach, as receiving coaching does not carry the same implications that going to therapy might. And some therapists see coaching as a way to diversify their practice, allowing them to market to clients who simply wouldn’t attend counseling or therapy.
Life coaching is a perfectly respectable and well-defined profession. The problem with life coaching isn’t the work itself, for which there clearly is a market. It’s with the people providing it.
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The National Labor Relations Board declared this week that student assistants at private universities are employees and have the right to unionize. The decision overturned a 2004 precedent. It will allow thousands of teaching and research assistants to use collective bargaining to demand better pay and working conditions.
A while back, I wrote a textbook. It is now on its third edition, with the fourth edition due out in January. The book is, objectively speaking, expensive at $79, though good texts costing twice as much are not uncommon in graduate education for psychotherapists. Why are graduate textbooks so expensive? I’ll tell you.