License to diss

In Ohio, you’d scour the Help Wanted section of the newspaper and see jobs for hospital mental health workers. I’d eye these little plums offered at Riverside Methodist Hospital and OSU in Columbus. But at your second glance, you’d notice the hospital is only targeting licensed social workers (LISW), not licensed counselors (LPCC). And you’d learn that they really mean it. Another one bites the dust. Once, momentarily infuriated (panties in a bunch) not to be given a high load of clients (as a per-unit independent contractor), I made a solicitation to a different group practice in the neighborhood. This was for a psychotherapist position. But I was informed that only social workers would be considered. Who informed me of this? A licensed counselor.

Here in Nevada, while working at a good clinic, a nice job, I nevertheless put my name in at a hoity-toity-sounding group practice (the website features principals’ head shots that look like airbrushed stock photo beauties). But there was a glitch. While in Ohio, every Master’s-level clinician and her brother was either a Social Worker or a Counselor – the marriage and family therapist license (LMFT) was brand new there – in Nevada, every brother and his half-step-niece is a Marriage & Family Therapist, often courtesy of University of Phoenix® Online. The coin of the realm, whatever its value. So at Pretty Place, no counselors admitted! I’ve seen the same with hospital ads here. Imagine – an ER or med-surg or psychiatric unit needs a clinician to do crisis intervention, brief intensive counseling and resource referral, and it desires a Marriage & Family Therapist! How sweet! The Borderline is screaming like a harpy with a turbine up her ass, vomiting charcoal and waving her oceanic ridges of red arm slices, and she needs Systems Therapy!

Folks: All of you who hire. Please know the right positive and the right negative. Each one of us (positive) is his own person, with qualities and experience inimitable. No social work, psychology or counseling program (negative) makes a fine psychotherapist. Please know that most, probably all of us in this field come to it because of our garbage scow of neuroses. The question will then be: Who of us knows it, who of us has done ultra-serious acid Ex-Lax work on our problems, and has lived to tell it. This is what matters, not your judgment of my license.

A new hire here, a Marriage & Family Therapist, does not want to see schizophrenics or other psychotics. And she will not have to. Treat the fragile Phoenix gently.