I know someone who is in training to be a therapist. It still takes an absurdly long time and a lot of money to get any of those degrees. In New York, for example, there's a mandatory multi-thousand-hour internship that essentially treats you as indentured labor for several years -- and this is after getting a masters, which you usually pay for. The average case ends up substantially in debt, for a field where private practice pays mediocre salaries.

(Hot take: the masters was the truly offensive part of the equation -- most of the content was total bullshit / pseudo-intellectual woo. At least you're getting supervised practical training in the internship, even if your salary is low.)

Yeah my wife is a MFT and it’s wild how long the process has drawn out before she made money. School, internship, practicum (actually just another internship), license exam, associates licensure requires a supervisor- either you pay them to supervise you or you have to work somewhere that will hire associates.

Anecdotally, as someone who is considering a career change out of tech, I am constantly shocked at just how long and how expensive it is to change careers to do anything else.

I shouldn't be surprised, given how much training it took me to get into this field, but being paid nothing and spending years in training was much easier to tolerate at 20 than at 40.

> most of the content was total bullshit / pseudo-intellectual woo. At least you're getting supervised practical training in the internship

If you're lucky enough to get an unusually good internship.

Won't most of the interns be shadowing someone who is just practicing the same bullshit/pseudo-intellectual woo the elder therapist was taught by the same programs a few years earlier?

I don't know, but it seemed to be a pretty different level of thinking from the outside. When you're providing a service, you're grounded by the customer.

Depressed/anxious/whatever people don't generally want to have navel-gazing conversations about gender fluidity and the metaphysical dialectic (or whatever; I'm making up something woo-y). They want to feel better.

for anyone else wondering WTF is going on :P

LPC - Licensed Professional Counselor, 24 states + DC

LMHC - Licensed Mental Health Counselor, 7 states (NY)

LCPC - Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, 7 states (IL)

LPCC - Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, 6 states (CA)

...

MSW is likely Master of Social Work

( https://www.psychotherapynotes.com/decoding-counselor-alphab... )

Where are you getting state counts, and what do they mean here?

As far as I know, most states have procedures for licensing several of these categories, and a couple more besides (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, for example).

The state counts are from the linked website. (As someone from Europe I have zero idea about any of this. I was just fascinated by the "TLAs".)

Another OAAI member, I see (Overuse of acronyms and initialisms) /s