Why Therapists Quit Part 2
Curt and Katie chat about the response from listeners to our episode on why therapists quit. We look at the differences in responses (those who felt angry and those who felt validated) as well as our reasons for doubling down. We also dig into the differences between pessimism and realism, pairing our realistic take on the current problems with a call to action that aspires to change the systemic problems we’ve started to outline.
It’s time to reimagine therapy and what it means to be a therapist. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy talk about how to approach the role of therapist in the modern age.
Click here to scroll to the podcast transcript.Transcript
In this episode we talk more about why therapists quit:
- Responding to listener feedback on Why Therapists Quit
- The critical feedback we received related to the “negative tone” we put forward
- The positive feedback from listeners who felt seen
- The different stages of individuals’ careers and how they responded
- Assessing whether we are doing the profession a disservice by speaking the truth of our experiences and the problems we see in the profession
- How the knowledge of the information that this job is hard can impact the relationships with our clients, consultees, supervisees, etc.
“We have a super hard job and it’s powerful. And because it’s hard it means that we can do amazing work. But we have to honor that because if we don’t honor that, therapists are going to feel unseen.” – Katie Vernoy, LMFT
- “Saving Psychotherapy” by Dr. Ben Caldwell
- The individual responsibility that clinicians are taking for systemic issues
- The problem when we don’t understand the system before we’re deep into the career
- The expectation that therapists must be good all of the time – which is unrealistic
- How we’re looking for ways to improve the therapy system, the mental health profession, etc.
- The responsibility we feel to help change
- How critical it is to frame the problem before you can solve
- Why it is important to opt in to a job, warts and all
- The problem of idealizing the profession
- Our plan for a new series that talks about the state of mental health care
- Differentiating between realism and pessimism
- The values systems for therapists that can be challenged by the system
- The response from therapists who may be more pessimistic than Curt and Katie are at this time
- A call to action to reach critical mass in order to make a change
- The people who don’t make it into the profession for many different reasons
- The shifts in the smaller systems (improving work environments)
- Whether our clients listen and what they might think about what we’re talking about
“Our responsibility is to help to make this profession better…It’s not just getting stuck on looking at these problems and thinking that they’re going to be around forever. But it’s coming together saying these are problems that we’re no longer willing to stand for because they are impacting us, and because it’s impacting us, it’s impacting clients.” – Curt Widhalm, LMFT
- Our responsibility in our role in this podcast, to make the profession better
- How we’ll be moving forward in an upcoming series, looking for solutions
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Resources for Modern Therapists mentioned in this Podcast Episode:
We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode and put together some handy-dandy links. Please note that some of the links below might be affiliate links, so if you purchase after clicking below, we may get a little bit of cash in our pockets. We thank you in advance!
Saving Psychotherapy by Dr. Ben Caldwell
From Decisive by Dan Heath, Chip Heath: 40 studies of realistic job previews. Jean M, Phillips (1998), “Effects of Realistic Job Previews on Multiple Organizational Outcomes: a Meta-analysis,” Academy of Management Journal 41: 673-90
Relevant Episodes of MTSG Podcast:
A Living Wage for Prelicensees
Who we are:
Curt Widhalm, LMFT
Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com
Katie Vernoy, LMFT
Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also Past President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com
A Quick Note:
Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.
Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.
Stay in Touch with Curt, Katie, and the whole Therapy Reimagined #TherapyMovement:
Consultation services with Curt Widhalm or Katie Vernoy:
Connect with the Modern Therapist Community:
Our Facebook Group – The Modern Therapists Group
Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:
Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/
Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/
Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):
Curt Widhalm 0:00
This episode of The Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide is brought to you by Heard Bookkeeping and Tax.
Katie Vernoy 0:04
Tax season is about to get a whole lot easier. As a mental health care professional dedicated to your own practice you’re probably more familiar with your session notes than with your financial records, and this time of year can feel stressful and daunting. Luckily Heard Bookkeeping and Tax is a platform designed to help you track the financial health of your practice and alleviate the stress around your business finances. Built specifically for therapists, Heard offers affordable bookkeeping services, personalized financial reporting, and tax assistance to ensure clinicians make the most of their business.
Curt Widhalm 0:37
Schedule your first consultation at joinheard.com That’s joinheard j o i n h e a r d.com.
Announcer 0:46
You’re listening to The Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.
Curt Widhalm 0:59
Welcome back modern therapists, this is The Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy. And we’re back for part two of Why Therapist’s Quit. And our episode a couple of weeks ago garnered quite a bit of commentary from our audience. We felt that we were reaching out to some of the people who had responded to us and thought that because it was such a big discussion that was unfolding that we would come back to it. And I noticed in the responses to us that there seem to be kind of three categories, but I’ll put it into two, if you want to tease it out into three, that we’ll see where this episode goes. On one end of this, we got a lot of criticism from some of our listeners here around the negative tone that the episode seemed to take. And despite us framing it as an episode of this is about therapists quit and about therapists personal responses to systemic problems that we had some positive calls to action, at the end still left foul taste in some people’s mouths. On the other hand, we had some very positive responses that people felt very validated. And in kind of looking at some of the commentary and knowing some of the people who reached out to us, it became very clear that the negative responses came from people earlier in their careers, either people who are still students or very early on in their associate-ships or internships, whereas many of the positive responses came from people who have been licensed and either for a few years or several years. And so it’s very interesting to parse out some of those responses, that third category, we had a couple of people who aren’t mental health professionals reach out to us as well. Their responses kind of echoed those of students and people newer to the career. Katie and I have had a number of discussions here over the last couple of weeks, as far as where does this sit with us. And one of the comments in particular that I would like to start this out with is around, that we’re maybe doing the profession a disservice by speaking negatively about it.
Katie Vernoy 3:29
It seems like this episode really struck a nerve, especially around that point, that we’re doing a disservice by speaking the truth of our own experiences, but also of the colleagues and others that we’ve talked to. And to me, whether the term was impaired, and harmful or cynical, and entitled, I, I understood the response, but to me, the the thing that felt very surprising about those responses were either a level of feeling betrayed, or feeling angry at us. And to me, I felt like there was a lot of soul searching that both of us did. And I think even in our conversations together, like are we just too burned out to be talking about this? Like, is this something where we are doing some sort of disservice here? And I’m like, No, I mean, we even reference back to toxic work environments, we can reference back to the burnout system, or, you know, there’s many times we’ve talked about this topic specifically. And maybe this is, you know, kind of more a reflection of our growing listenership and the expansion of who’s listening and why they’re listening. But to me, I was surprised at that. And my initial response was as a human saying, wait, wait a second. I’m speaking truth. I’m trying and I always feel like I’m trying to do what’s I feel like in the best of the profession. And so to be called harmful? That just felt really bad. Like, I was just like, wait a second, don’t I get to? Don’t I get to have an opinion? Like, what is this about? And I and I, as I was reflecting on it, I recognized that part of what the system requires from so many in this profession, is to hold it at this sunshine and rainbows level. Because if we say, hey, this job is really hard. It adds something to our individual therapeutic relationships with our clients. It adds something to potentially what our relationship is with our supervisees if we’re in that role, where we have to, like have this uncomfortable conversation about are you wanting to be here talking to me right now? Do you want to help me? And so to me, it was like, Well, I’m not necessarily worried about that, because I think that’s part of showing up as a whole person. And part of it also is my responsibility as a human to be able to do what I need to do to show up for each of my clients, and each of my consultees or supervisees, or whatever that is like I, I feel like we can have that be true and have the other piece be true, which is I’m doing the best within the system to show up in the way that I can.
Curt Widhalm 6:29
I think part of what really sparked a lot of Katie in my early work is our friend Ben Caldwell’s book Saving Psychotherapy. And Ben was one of our Therapy Reimagined speakers during our first conference, and very powerfully started off the conference by pointing out that fewer and fewer people are going to therapy, that therapists are getting paid less and less, especially when you adjust for, you know, inflation over the last couple of decades that there’s an ever expanding number of requirements that are being added on to therapists. And we hear all the time about this mental health crisis that’s going to happen, that already is happening. That has a constant, individual responsibility for systemic problems. Because when therapists are framed to have to give and give and give and deal with all of the issues that come up in their work to be present for clients who are going through these things. Many of us enter into the profession with that as our intention to help people through their hardest times.
Katie Vernoy 7:47
Yes.
Curt Widhalm 7:49
Where we don’t get this information early enough in our career until it slaps us in the face is how we also face that from the systems above us. And so it ends up being this push pull between being responsible for clients, which we want to do.
Katie Vernoy 8:05
Yeah.
Curt Widhalm 8:06
We want to help people on. But can we talk about the number of client case loads, the number of clients that would go on a caseload, being more than can be actually physically seeing our abilities to be able to be reimbursed are based on a medical model that is not possible for mental health care providers. If I go to the doctor, doctor has four or five different patient rooms. Patients can sit around for 15-20 minutes while he’s seeing somebody else wrapping up and he can just bounce from room to room. I can’t have four or five different people waiting for me to show up for an hour at a time. And so, the reimbursements end up being things that are larger systems sort of things. But there seems to be this dissonance within the profession around not being able to speak negatively about it until people actually run into these problems themselves. We only want to focus on the good. And we do good work. I believe in therapy.
Katie Vernoy 9:12
Yeah.
Curt Widhalm 9:13
There’s lots of ways to make therapy better. And there’s lots of ways of making the profession better for therapists.
Katie Vernoy 9:20
Yeah.
Curt Widhalm 9:23
It’s this expectation that therapists are going to be good all of the time. That is an unrealistic standard. And that we’re going to be altruistic every single moment that we’re not going to have humanity yet time and time again, our most popular episodes are around dealing with burnout, how to do better self care, the toxic work environment sort of things that are individual responses to systemic problems. So for us to speak to the individual responses to the systemic problems, we have to look at the systemic problems in order to change the system. And we’ve been pretty consistent with that through nearing 200 episodes now of looking at ways to improve the therapy systems, looking at ways to advocate. And this is really hard to hear when you’re either moving out of a profession that’s not based on giving and altruism, being self fulfilling, getting out of the rat race of some other fields here.
Katie Vernoy 10:33
Yeah.
Curt Widhalm 10:35
But it doesn’t mean that we as a mental health profession have things figured out and that we’re great to everybody who’s involved. And that’s the role that Katie and I really feel like being able to address means that we can take this from not just kind of allowing this to continue to happen and pass this on to the next generation of therapists to be burned out, but to take our lived experiences, and to be able to use those as jumping off points for reasons to change the system so that way, other people don’t have to feel the same way.
Katie Vernoy 11:07
I think it’s hard for folks to recognize when we’re framing a problem, versus when we’re trying to solve the problem. And to me, framing the problem is, so it’s critical to be able to solve it. Like we have to frame the problem, we have to understand it. And I think research shows that if you opt in, and I’ll have to find this to put this in the show notes. But research shows that if you actually opt in to a crappy job, like you fully understand what the crappy job is, and you opt in, you’re more likely to stay than if you’ve been lied to and enter it without knowledge of what you’re actually signing up for. Even if it’s like, hey, this job is going to be super crappy. Like, it’s hard, blah, blah, blah, like this is the real deal. You know, you actually still stay if you’ve, if you’ve decided and opted in and so I don’t feel bad about letting people know, you know, behind the curtain what therapy can look like. But I as you were talking about folks who are kind of shifting careers, so not the folks that are like bright eyed and bushy tailed, you know, they just finished their bachelor’s program, and they’re looking to become a therapist. And so they’re looking at master’s programs, or they’re just in getting ready to start practicum like, you know, like brand new first career folks, like they need to know what they’re in for. But I was thinking about second career folks. And, and I actually have a lot of these folks in my own therapy practice, not necessarily thinking about moving to therapy, but people who are in highly lucrative careers, and they feel burned from the corporate system. You know, they, you know, they don’t want to just focus on money, or they don’t want to just focus on sales, or whatever it is, and, and I think about what I if, if it was of interest to them, or they started down that path, if I was going to, whether or not I would recommend, I guess, becoming a therapist. And I think I would and I think that just because I framed a problem with the system does not mean I don’t think it’s a worthy endeavor. And I think and maybe I’m just saying this in a in a more, you know, one on one way versus a systemic way. But I, I think if people can know what they’re signing up for. And maybe maybe we would need to do an episode of why therapists stay or that kind of stuff. But I feel like, you know, our episode or our podcast is for therapists, I think they kind of know why they want to be a therapist, but like, but to me, it’s like, you get into it for the meaningfulness. And so getting back to being able to focus on that feels most important, but we can’t do that if the system shackles us to diagnostic systems that don’t reflect real people, or reimbursement systems that require tons and tons of flips and gymnastics, in order to be able to get reimbursed or inefficient programs that mean that you’re spending more time on bureaucracy than on clinical work. Like, to me, it’s a worthwhile endeavor. If you go in without knowledge, you’re not going to stay. And so being aware of what the problems are, allow you to actually often and stay in the work but they also and this is where we’re going to be heading in in a few weeks, with a new series that we’re putting together. If you’re armed with knowledge around what the problems are in the system. You can identify opportunities to make big changes because I think we’re in a really great time in society to be able to make some changes to the system at large.
Curt Widhalm 15:00
As summarized by the philosopher Bojack Horseman. When you’re wearing rose colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.
Katie Vernoy 15:10
Yes, yes.
Curt Widhalm 15:12
You know, research that you’re referring to that. And we’ll link these in our show notes at mtsgpodcast.com. But now there’s this idealism about what therapy is, transform people. And that it just doesn’t look at the realities of what the implementation of that is. That many of the theories that we study are based on systems that predated private health insurance, at least in America. But this is also true with a lot of the people that we talk to all over the world that even with nationalized health care sort of jobs, that people talk about having to go to work with workface on, to have therapists face to go in to implement these mandated sort of things that are not the deep passionate work that is sold on how we connect to our clients, to get people into grad schools. That is, you know, to prop up our, our newly developing therapists and support them that it’s being able to try to match up what is why we enter into this profession, what’s profession that’s actually there. And that’s the advocacy piece, because one of the comments that we saw echoes a comment that I regularly get in teaching my classes and some of the workshops that I give, which is we try to present things, I try to present things as having realism that comes across as pessimism. And in the absence of optimism, and a lot of things do just look like pessimism. But I think that there’s a substantial difference between the two. And that is that while both realism and pessimism can point out problems, pessimism inherently as a, this is never going to change. We must say this, whereas philosophically realism is, here’s problems, and there’s things that we can do about it. And I think that oftentimes that the sour look at, there are still problems here. There are things that prevent us from doing the things that enter into our profession, as well as we would like to. People don’t always hear the parts of And there’s possibilities for change. There’s things that we can do to make things better, there’s reasons to advocate and to create better systems around us. We can, as professionals, take space for ourselves, so that way, we can continue to do that. And that’s the part where any sort of therapist who’s going to say, I’m creating this space for myself, even if it echoes the parallel process of what’s going on to a client ends up looking like selfishness, because it’s not giving and giving and giving and giving. On one hand, we hear, you know, your session needs to end at 48 minutes so that way you can hear a you can bill a specific CPT code and get reimbursed at the correct amount without needing to spend hours on the phone with an insurance company to get things sorted out. On the other hand, you hear, you know, those extra few minutes at the end of a session, those are really meaningful to me, you know, you’re still facing a push pull between two different systems that have competing goals. And we’re not always creating the space for the third goal of the therapists themselves having the space to actually be in this profession for reasons that might be fulfilling in other ways, making a decent living in order to be able to spend time with their family, in order to have a feeling of impact on the world, while also still being able to take care of themselves. And this is where this being a podcast for therapists to speak about very real therapist issues, to not only just acknowledge that these are issues that we face, that it’s important for us to remind our listening audience here that, you know, there’s, you know, problems here. There’s a validation here that we’re trying to create. But we constantly are coming back to this call to action of we should be changing the system and there are steps to do this and Katie previewing this series that we have coming up that we firmly believe in is things that start to address many of these things that we find ourselves, validating our audience with.
Katie Vernoy 19:51
So on the other end of the spectrum, so to speak, and this is from more of our experienced listeners. We did get support, I guess, but also gratitude for validating the experience. And there were some folks that went to, you know, kind of in the response to, hey, this was negative, went to How dare you, you know, we should not be gaslighting new therapists. And we don’t you know, I don’t remember exactly the phrases. So I’ll stop making things up. But there was something there I want to speak to as well, which is folks who maybe are a bit more pessimistic than we actually are. Like, this is horrible, and it’s never going to change. And how dare you say that we have to speak positively about something that’s so messed up. And I’ve been in that spot. And I think especially right up right before I, I ejected from public mental health, I think I was in that spot like this system can never be fixed, I cannot do anything else. And I am very disappointed and grrr. And so I think, to those folks who we validated. Yes. Valid. Absolutely. This is really hard. And you probably have made a choice to shift your career a bit in order to be able to either be a therapist in a way that’s more suited to you, or become a coach or a course creator, whatever, so that you can still have an impact without some of the weight of being a therapist that we were describing. But I also don’t want to let these folks off the hook, because they’re part of the solution I see. I think there’s a critical mass that’s needed. And we talked about this in, I don’t remember the episode, the name of the episode, but it was about the pre licensee pay statement that you were by yourself banging the drum over and over again. And then as there was more awareness shown on that problem, and then additional voices that joined yours, we were able to do something at a large professional association, that may start tipping the scales a little bit towards solving that particular problem in our profession. And so you know, and we’ve talked about this a number of times, but we can’t just move forward and leave the mess behind us like we we as a profession, we’re calling on folks who are passionate enough to be listening to this episode, to join the the critical mass that’s needed to make some of these changes, because there’s big lifts that we’re going to be talking about soon. Big things that could have huge impact, but require all of us plus everyone we know, to stand up and say these are the types of changes that are needed at the local level, at the county level, at the state level, at the national level. And so to me, I want to say, hey, it’s valid, we know you’re tired, we know that, that you’ve been chewed up and potentially spit out of the system. But we still need your help.
Curt Widhalm 23:10
Not only are we validating the people who have been licensed and through this and survived, but I think what’s missed in this too is how many people don’t make it. Who don’t get licensed, who quit, who, why they quit. You know, we point out for our own personal reasons. And some of the things you know, that you think about afterwards, after we recorded that episode is the number of people who quit to go and raise their own families. You know, they might hold a license, but they aren’t actively working. And it’s because of a lot of the issues that we talked about that. We have a mailbag episode coming out next week where some of the very personal questions about the way that our profession impacts our relationship with those in families. You know, check out next week’s episode for our answer on that, but a lot of these systemic issues come back to again, one of Ben Caldwell’s points, therapies, by the rich for the rich, you have to be able to afford to have these problems. You have to be able to afford to be able to deal with these problems that systemically keeps a lot of people from being able to see their way through licensure, it disproportionately affects communities of color from entering into our profession. It is something where being able to make therapy more accessible for so many clients to meet the ever changing demands of the system. We’re also validating a lot of people who just didn’t survive, who chose a different career path, who chose to become a full time parent instead, who go and move on to a number of different things. And this is again a part of where I was talking with somebody about, you know, if I was put in charge of a community mental health agency, some of the systemic things that I would do, and we talked about this in our systemic self care episode, or our structural self care episode around just being able to create more retention based ideas around our workforce, of being able to look at things beyond just throwing a couple of dollars more an hour at somebody. That doesn’t change case loads that are way too big. It doesn’t change the off the clock requirements, there’s articles that I saw about people working in community mental health, that take vacation days to catch up on their notes, in order to be able to meet demands for positions that are well beyond what we can do. And, you know, we can look at any other profession, you know, Amazon is one of the ones that, you know, hearing the warehouse workers have job tasks that they have to do that you have people who are passing out on their warehouse floors, that other employees are stepping over to meet their work quotas. Well, we’re not quite there, as far as what mental health professionals do, you know, the claims that we should unionize like Amazon workers are trying to do. Some places that works in our profession, a lot of places it doesn’t, and so being able to change the system, so that way, even if we can’t unionize that we can still collectively come together and create some commands for respecting that therapy isn’t this magical place that people just show up and their mental health is taken care of. But there’s people on the other end of that, too,
Katie Vernoy 26:43
I think about shifting the smaller systems. And you actually asked me this question before we started recording on what did I do to try to take care of my, my team, my staff members? And, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of stuff I did, I tried to create efficiencies, so they could focus on the clinical work, and not all the bureaucracy, I created engagement activities, you know, let’s go off and have supervision in a park or, you know, whatever. And we’ll talk about philosophical things, since we can’t talk about cases in a public space or you know, those kinds of things. Helping them to opt in to how do we how do we work within the system and do the problem solving together or realigning people with roles that fit better, you know, you want to work deeper with fewer cases, let’s put you in intensive. You want to work, you know, in more of a traditional way, let’s put you in a, you know, an outpatient, a typical outpatient model, whatever it is. And even with those things, and I think they were helpful, and I think there are folks that were working for me that are still working for me, are working for the agency. And so there was at least some support that I did. It feels like at each stage, there’s still that larger societal element of it that doesn’t value monetarily mental health services. And so there’s, there’s oftentimes not enough money to throw at this problem. Now, I don’t think that will always be the case, especially now. And yes, stay tuned. There’s some episodes about some systemic things that may throw money at this. But even with those things, I think it’s, it’s something where each individual has to make their own decisions on where it’s acceptable for them to work. I think people in leadership need to do their best to try to improve to the point that they can. But I come back to the conversations that I think were most impactful for my staff, were the ones where we talked in real talk about how we felt overwhelmed. What was hardest about families that were yelling at us or families that were not complying with treatment and how hard it is. And when we honored. This is a hard job, what therapists do, and especially therapists and community mental health that are going into folks homes, and into some situations that are a little bit lower on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than enlightenment and self reflection, which some folks in private practice get to work on. But we’re going into rooms, facing things that most people don’t want to face, potentially being yelled at and demanded of. And then we have a healing conversation. We go back, we do our notes. We rebuild ourselves up if we have enough time to do so, we talk with our colleagues. And then we walk back into that room or space with the client where anyone else in their life probably would have walked away because of how hard it what it is that there is that they’re facing. We have a super hard job, and it’s powerful. And because it’s hard, it means that we can do amazing work. But we have to honor that. Because if we don’t honor that, therapists are going to feel unseen.
Curt Widhalm 30:20
One of the comments that we got was, I hope that your clients don’t listen to this.
Katie Vernoy 30:27
And then there’s that.
Curt Widhalm 30:30
Which, interestingly enough, one of my clients did hear this episode. And what is…
Katie Vernoy 30:35
Interesting.
Curt Widhalm 30:36
And I have permission to share this from the client, but part of our session was around that this client had left to seek out another therapist within their insurance network, and ultimately ended up coming back to me after a few months of seeing somebody else, and gladly resumed paying the fee that I was charging that was much higher than their insurance costs. And the client said, I get why you charge what you do, to create the space, to be responsive in the ways that you can be makes sense. So that way, you can take care of me, which is something that we’ve advocated from our end of things for a very long time. I think that we have a responsibility in our role in this podcast to show up for you as our audience, you can disagree with us, I don’t care, you know.
Katie Vernoy 31:37
Well actually we would prefer it sometimes. So that we can have something to talk about.
Curt Widhalm 31:42
Our responsibility is to help to make this profession better. And so let you know, we’ve been teasing this kind of throughout this episode of some stuff that we have coming up. But in really looking at changing mental health care, and the spirit of putting in place what works to be able to do this through Medicaid and Medicare and other national systems. To be able to look at what changing mental health in the educational settings, in the correctional settings actually looks like. In ways that research shows and talk to by people who are in positions to either change that, or people who are in positions that, see what works, but the systems don’t allow for what works and to be able to really bring together a call to action for how we can change government policy, and the implementation of those policies. This is where we take this look at problems and turn this into solution oriented advocacy efforts. And we’re really happy with the interviews that we’ve been conducting on this. It’s a new way that we’re going to be looking at some of the ways that we do our podcasts, you’re gonna hear us kind of approach things a little bit differently in some of these episodes. We have hoped that things can get better. And it does take that critical mass that Katie was talking about. That it’s not just getting stuck on looking at these problems and thinking that they’re going to be around forever. But it’s coming together saying these are problems that we’re no longer willing to stand for because they are impacting us. And because it’s impacting us, it’s impacting clients. So we’ll include some links to stuff in our show notes. Once again, that’s at mtsgpodcast.com. Please continue to reach out to us. Let us know what you think of this episode and any others and we’ll gladly address those. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear all of the new and exciting things that Katie and I have coming up. Join our therapist Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group, and until next time I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy.
Katie Vernoy 34:03
Thanks again to our sponsor Heard Bookkeeping and Tax.
Curt Widhalm 34:06
As a therapist, you’re probably too preoccupied with your caseload want to think about bookkeeping or tax filing. Heard Bookkeeping and Tax is a platform built specifically for therapists that helps you track and improve your practices financial health. Regardless of whether you’re a seasoned clinician or in your first year of practice, Heard will help you identify areas for growth and streamline best financial practices for your business. When you sign up with Heard, you’ll work directly with financial specialists track your income and expenses, file taxes online and grow your business. You’ll also receive financial insights such as profit and loss statements and personalized monthly reports. You can say goodbye to poring over spreadsheets and guessing your tax deductions or quarterly payments. Focus on your clients and Heard will take care of the rest.
Katie Vernoy 34:48
Dr. Jennifer Kashani, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Los Angeles says Heard has simplified and streamlined bookkeeping and best business practices in a digestible and accessible way. Having the foundation of Heard for my business has made myself and in turn my patients feel more solid.
Curt Widhalm 35:06
Plans begin at $60 per month and can be easily tailored to fit your business’s financial needs. You can schedule your first consultation at www.joinheard.com
Announcer 35:16
Thank you for listening to The Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. Learn more about who we are and what we do at mtsgpodcast.com. You can also join us on Facebook and Twitter. And please don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our episodes.
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