Plans for those who did not get in this round-Clinical Psychology

[smalltownpsych]

I can see both sides of this. But if master's level clinicians are viewed as "competition" for psychologists (implying functional equivalence), then we have a bigger problem on our hands.

I am glad that you can see both sides of this because I was thinking that it was somewhat of a dialectical dynamic. Also, mid-level encroachment is a problem for all of healthcare IMO.

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[deleted343839]

I am glad that you can see both sides of this because I was thinking that it was somewhat of a dialectical dynamic. Also, mid-level encroachment is a problem for all of healthcare IMO.

So true. I think it is an even greater problem for medicine.

Remember, it's not "mid-level encroachment," it's "practicing at the top of one's license." Got to get the euphemisms right.

 

[A Blue Duck]

It's just not really enough of a difference to matter to me, to be honest. Median income for LCSWs is 68k, median for clinical psychologists is 88k; when you consider that one spends 5 more years in the workforce while the other is still in school, that's literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost income you need to play catch up on. Feel free to chime in if anyone sees a flaw in this reasoning, but I feel no real regret in taking a pass on this career, particularly given the fact that most students I've ever interacted with seem more psychologically ravaged than the clients they work with. I guess it comes down to how important it is to you to do clinical research, and after a few years of exposure to the eternal traffic jam of academia, I'm literally wiping my brow and saying "Whew" thinking about it. I'm just not that kind of person, though, and would much rather focus on clinical work.

Flaws:
1. Your remark about "psychologically ravaged" students being worse off than their clients is hyperbolic nonsense.
2.Your purely monetary focus has, seemingly, made you forget that social workers and clinical psychologists do different jobs.
3. Your obvious bias makes it difficult to parse the potentially legitimate complaints about academia from components specifically at odds with your personal perspective and preferences.

If you have a purely clinical focus, many of today's clinical psychology PhD programs will not be for you. It is simply the belief of these programs that the best way to train clinicians involves a foundation of competence in research.