Family therapy Archives - Page 22 of 29

Common mistakes when dealing with the BBS

August 7, 2017 by Robin Andersen

Alice Achterhof / Unsplash The California Board of Behavioral Sciences (BBS) tends to elicit negative responses from MFT registered interns, trainees, and students, and probably for good reason. The “horror stories” relating to therapists’ experiences with the BBS seem endless at times, and unfortunately, these stories can contribute to feelings of stress that are already being experienced by aspiring marriage and family therapists. Avoiding these five common mistakes can help reduce those feelings of stress when dealing with the BBS.

[Ed. note: This is a guest post written by our friend Robin Andersen, who runs the excellent resource Prelicensed.com. More about Robin appears at the end of this post. For more great resources for prelicensed therapists, check out this article. -bc]

MFT license portability

July 25, 2017 by Ben Caldwell

By Mk2010 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons Ah, to be a medical doctor. To only have to pass the boards once, and then be done with it. MFT license portability isn’t so easy.

Marriage and family therapists — who, at least in theory, practice the same profession no matter where they roam — are subject to a mishmash of licensure laws around the 50 states, with similar-but-different requirements for education, experience, and examinations. Taking your MFT license to a new state can be a challenge, as you may be forced to provide transcripts and even syllabi from classes taken decades ago, register as an intern or associate even if you’ve been fully licensed, and in some states, go through another testing process.

Essential resources for prelicensed therapists

March 7, 2018July 10, 2017 by Ben Caldwell

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.

Applying for disability accommodations on licensing exams

June 15, 2017 by Ben Caldwell

If you have a recognized disability, you can apply for a quiet room, additional time, or other appropriate accommodations for your licensing exam. Exact rules, and the process for applying, will vary by state. But every state has to make reasonable accommodations in the exam process under federal law.

Though there is little hard data, I’ve heard from multiple people who work for state licensing boards around the country that requests for disability accommodations are becoming more common in license exams for psychologists, counselors, social workers, and family therapists.

What’s going on with California’s MFT Clinical Exam? [Updated]

May 8, 2017May 8, 2017 by Ben Caldwell

It is certainly debatable what an ideal pass rate for licensing exams should be. If the pass rate is high, that means almost everyone gets through. Then the tests don’t serve a meaningful function. (That’s pretty much the status quo.) If the pass rate is low, it raises questions about the validity of the exam, given how much time most examinees spend preparing for it. But what makes a pass rate too high or too low? Given that the exams don’t do much of anything anyway, it’s hard to say for sure.

But it does raise eyebrows when pass rates for a single exam fall off a cliff, as seems to have happened for California MFTs over the past year.