Hello, I am currently a psychology major, working on my bachelors. My current goal is a Masters in Psychology, but I am questioning this choice considering the high unemployment rate of psych majors, and also the amount that you receive compared to what you put in, seems to have an unbalance (at least from my own research I've noticed). Going into college I was originally going to do pre-med and pursue psychiatry, however, the long and very expensive years getting there sorta psyched me away. I did not want to spend my entire 20's in school, just to get out and work to pay off my student loan debt. But I am starting to realize that a PhD in psychology provides more opportunities and somewhat (not by much) of a better pay than just having a masters. So wouldn't it make better sense to just get my MD in Psychiatry than my PhD/PsyD in Psychology considering the schooling is just as long (minus the residency for MD). I know it seems the financials are a big focus of mine, but considering the times and the healthcare reform, I want to know my years of education will pay off, especially since either route will give me a huge debt to pay off.
When it comes to the ideal work, one day I'd like to have an independent/associated practice. I am more into psychotherapy. I'm not the biggest fan of prescription drugs when it comes to the mind, but I do understand they help and sometimes are necessary. A professor of mine once said that considering the rate of our nations decline and world issues, more and more people are falling into depression and other mental issues, so the need and demand for psychiatrist is needed more than a psychologist, and that a psychologists actual effectiveness is just as much as talking to your closest friend. This made a lot of sense to me, and actually agree to a certain extent. So I think having the ability to prescribe meds is better than not, especially in today's world full of struggles and stress that people just can't tolerate.
The two have their pros and cons, I just cant decide which one outweighs the other. Any advice? Please and thank you!
Not that long ago, I was in a situation very similar to your current circumstances. After college, I continued to pursue my "dreams" by obtaining a master's degree in clinical psychology, with the clear conviction to become a licensed mental health therapist ASAP. So after graduate school, for nearly six years, I served as an Assessment Counselor in the Admissions Department of a freestanding psychiatric hospital (i.e., an understaffed, underfunded, and generally poorly equipped "Psychiatric ER").
For the majority of my "tenure" there (much of it on the graveyard shift), this essentially meant that I, as a freshly graduated M.A. clinician (way before eligibility for L.P.C. licensure), had to single-handedly manage our entire Intake area, which consisted of numerous daunting responsibilities and, unfortunately, many other irritating menial tasks: answering our 24/7 crisis phone, which had at least five incoming lines that were often ringing simultaneously; "wanding" all the presenting patients with a cheap metal detector, in our totally deserted lobby, in order to detect/confiscate any weapons in their possession (because the facility "couldn't afford" a security guard); explaining all of the voluminous registration paperwork to patients/family members, and laboriously assisting many of those individuals who were often too lazy/irritable/impatient/indignant to fill out their paperwork themselves (the facility was also too cheap to pay a receptionist and/or registration clerk after 9PM); serving food trays and cold beverages according to my patients' fickle appetites and rude/entitled demands; escorting entire entourages of patients, significant others, and eccentric family members in and out repeatedly through our locked doors to appease their urgent "need" for q10minute cigarette breaks.
Once these never ending housekeeping functions were satisfied (at least temporarily for that particular moment), I then could plunge into the complex crap shoot of quickly and (somewhat) accurately triaging the relative acuity levels (I was always terribly "unfair", according to the patients) corresponding to each mentally-ill person within the exponentially-expanding mob of agitated patients surrounding me. Once I had identified which of these severely decompensated patients seemed to pose the greatest imminent risk, I immediately forged into the agonizing process of performing, and meticulously documenting, each element of our twelve-page interdisciplinary psychosocial assessment--which was essentially constructed by our business office to anticipate the idiosyncratic requests of every known insurance company in order to meet each of their highly intricate requirements.
As if conducting multiple comprehensive mental health evaluations of highly labile/agitated patients was not tedious enough to endure during the middle of the night, the mega-healthcare corporation which owned our hospital also required me to abruptly interrupt every assessment numerous times, by physically leaving the patient's evaluation room for several minutes, in order to perform (and document perfectly in each medical record) routine q15minute "safety checks" for all of the other waiting patients--whom I would have to search for and individually locate as they wandered around aimlessly within the lobby/hallways/restrooms, and also roamed spookily throughout the large institutional maze that formed our Intake area. This nightly disaster of pure mayhem quickly forced me to sprout a second pair of eyes on the back of my head. Of course I was also forced to pristinely document a lot of little details which I never actually did, because god forbid the chart did not appear perfectly complete. None of my superiors ever worried about how my patients had been doing throughout the night--they were far too busy focusing on whether their medical records were strong enough to justify additional treatment reimbursements from our holy-worshiped insurance companies.
By this stage of nearly every night, I had typically given up on responding to our suicide hotline--from which I could hear the piercing shriek of several lines ringing frantically off the hook, for long stretches of time, through the papery walls of our communal intake office--inside of which my (also communal) cubicle was conveniently located adjacent to our massive, perpetually-screeching fax machine. And by this time, that evil machine would invariably be churning out encyclopedia-thick stacks of direct admission referrals sent to us from our myriad network of uncooperative local hospital emergency departments, whose miserable and heartless staff were always neurotically scheming new strategies to bypass our standardized (EMTALA-mandated) transfer process, in order to ambush us with their latest shady dump-job train-wreck. Alternatively, presumably when the ER nurses weren't in the mood to play that game, they would simply make blatant threats to kick all of the annoying psych patients out of their ER immediately--with "off-the-record" instructions to spontaneously present at our facility as "walk-ins". But regardless of their method du jour, clearly their goal was to deposit those patients upon our threshold ASAP--always with astonishing speed, and via an ingeniously creative array of transportation means (including ambulances, police cars, constable vehicles, facility maintenance trucks, hospital shuttles, municipal transportation systems, personal automobiles; or even hobbling on foot, cane, walker, or wheelchair--whichever mode of travel happened to be the easiest, cheapest, and fastest to arrange at that particular time). On several occasions, their despicable tactics actually involved throwing an actively suicidal patient, alone without any monitoring, into a public taxi cab--while holding their own commitment papers in their hand, with instructions to deliver them to us upon arrival!
So anyway, in the midst of this daily chaotic bedlam, I would somehow manage to keep all of the patients swarming around me alive, and eventually (if it was a rarely smooth night without any major crises, complications, or dramas) I would gradually begin to make a dent in the overflowing bin of backed-up pending assessments, despite having to start and stop each one of my evaluations countless times for a rainbow of ridiculous reasons. But any sense of making headway was deceiving, because after each assessment (assuming I could convince the patient to voluntarily sign in, if needed, and didn't have to call the police), I then had to undertake the excruciatingly boring secretarial job of preparing our massive packet of admission paperwork, which all patients were required to sign by JHACO. (And every morning, you'd better believe that my non-clinical administrative supervisor scrutinized, with a fine-toothed comb, each of these documents that I had produced on my overnight shift). If any egregious mistake had been made, such as my forgetting to write a patient's numeric age on the line directly adjacent to their birthdate, then my very conscientious boss would immediately act upon her irrepressible compulsion to bring that error to my attention: With a curt telephone call in the middle of the day--invariably during my only narrow window of free time for that whole day, when I had foolishly hoped for the unlikely luxury to obtain 3 or 4 hours of sleep.
Moving on, so once I had verified that each of the monkey-forms comprising the patient's sign-in packet had been perfectly executed, I then moved on, as seamlessly as possible, to my next tedious clerical chore. This involved painstakingly entering all of the patient's data (such interesting information as demographics, contact info, next of kin, diagnosis codes, attending providers, insurance information, etc.) into our antiquated 1980s computer system. And since EMR software (like a security guard and a receptionist) was also far too expensive for my Fortune-500 employer's budget, after the patient's primitive dot-matrix face-sheet was printed, I then had I had to waste approximately another ten minutes Xeroxing numerous copies of my entire stack of handwritten documents. These duplicates next had to be manually sorted, and then stapled together with copies of the face-sheet into a variety of very particular combinations, to form specific packets of paperwork which I finally distributed to all the different departments throughout the hospital.
When the patient was finally ready to be admitted into their long-awaited bed, I was also expected to personally walk each patient the entire way to their assigned unit--because the lazy unit staff members certainly were not going to get up off their asses to come retrieve their patient. And to top it all off, I usually had to stand there on the unit waiting with the patient for quite some time, because the nurse had not yet officially declared him/herself ready to receive the new admission--despite the fact that I always gave them hours of advanced notice that their patient would eventually be arriving at approximately that time.
Once all this procedure had been done, and that patient was finally delivered safely to their unit, you might assume that the lengthy ordeal of their admission was finally over. But no! Rather, as soon as I got back to the intake area, I then had the great pleasure of calling the patient's insurance company, waiting interminably on hold, and ultimately spending up to 90 minutes reciting (usually repeating myself several times) the entire contents of my assessment to a snippy "clinical care manager." The next great pleasure was responding to their millions of asinine and irrelevant questions that had nothing whatsoever to do with the patient's reason for admission. These HMO employees are completely jaded, utterly burned-out former mental health professionals--who today hate their lives and clearly regret their career decision. Arguing with them, or joking for that matter, is like trying to communicate with a cynical, know-it-all robot. Anyway, once the divine sacrament of the glorious pre-cert was finally (begrudgingly) granted, which suggested that we would perhaps receive payment (someday) for that patient's treatment, I might have been tempted to feel a momentary slight sense of accomplishment.
But nope…by then it was time to go home (always at least an hour later than when I was "supposed" to leave) and begin to regroup myself, so that I could somehow face the whole ludicrous ordeal all over again 12 hours later!
If that's poverty, than I'm literally starving. 
