What’s keeping workers from going into the mental health care field?
Oregon is facing a drastic shortage of mental health care workers. The state needs as many as 35,000 new workers by some estimates to fill the mental health care needs in the state. But people interested and willing to go into the field are facing high barriers to doing the work. What can be done to change the system, and open up the pipeline of behavioral health care workers?
Read more: https://www.kgw.com/article/entertainment/television/programs/straight-talk/why-dont-people-become-mental-health-care-workers-oregon/283-83987c38-59c1-4246-965e-3a9f354b25ec
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12 Comments
I know a certified PhD psychiatrist who quit after 19 years because her support staff were more interested in cell phone activity than doing the work on the job, in the office, on a daily basis, at one of our PacNW hospitals. She just got sick of the unprofessional attitudes of the younger workers. That is what she told me.
Its a failed system. Low pay, 60+ hours a week(salaried), no support for staff, endless paperwork, no resources for clients, high burnout, and if anything goes wrong they will all blame you…sorry your not getting workers cause the workers are not appreciated and basically used
Insurance payers = problem, why aren't they on the panel?
FINALLY we are talking about this This is a super easy answer to the question. WE DONT VALUE MENTAL HEALTH IN THIS COUNTRY. . We like to pretend we do. we won't pay the taxes to fund it, we won't make the barriers to providing it smaller (education and student debt) and then we pay them God awful wages. If people think it's so important than the average tax payer needs to start paying more for it, insurance companies and licensing boards need to make a national panel that allows licensed mental health workers to be licensed everywhere in the United States.
I'm working on getting my state certificates right now. I can't wait to get started on this new path.
True, Oregon is in the top three states of least medical mental health prevention/care & it shows in the streets.
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You people at KGW8 are more responsible for homeless, crime and the terrible condition that is Portland because you have no intellectual integrity. You push mental health without even allowing the arguments against it and for other ways to address the same problems. You can look up every pejorative in the dictionary and it describes the people at KGW8.
You are propagandists, not journalists.
If people could read the comments I posted and were deleted by KGW8 they would easily realize KGW8 intentionally miss informs the public about mental healthcare. Moreover, they would realize the producers and news team intentionally foments violence and promotes medical incompetence, in the community by such wanton false reporting, completely biased and irrational reporting.
They deleted salient arguments, far more valid than those made by their program guests and the DSM-5 bootlickers whom have commented here.
If there is a shortage of workers, why not a single negative comment about the industry? Why presume its a shortage rather than a younger generation refusing to engage in the criminal insanity that is mental healthcare: medical insurance Frauds?
The story is about a shortage of mental healthcare workers, but KGW8 purposefully miss informs the public as to why that is. Could it be most people know the people working in mental healthcare are the very worst, least ethical, least intelligent people in the community who literally live as parasites on the rest of us and especially the poor and most vulnerable while they absorb the resources that could otherwise solve the existential problems of the State.
Could it be that, despite the Baby Boomer generation love for mental health, younger generations believe its disgusting, criminal and Fraudulent–certainly no job a decent person would even want to have?
Zero ethics, zero morality, drugs to make you smile = KGW8 = Portland going down the drain.
Low pay, safety, being injured by clients, no mandatory vacation just pto, no mental health day from dealing with clients tht are ill.
The pay for individuals who do not have a bachelor's degree or higher is not a livable wage.
This seems to be multiple causes and issues at once. As child births decreased you would believe or want to assume there would be a downward slope in mental conditions but it’s increasing. I think this is a result of society realizing mental health conditions exist but also because a large number of Americans in general are psychologically challenged. What I mean by this is we have a large percentage 30-40% that have traumas, issues and are self medicating and creating a larger issue in our current situation. I would like people to be truthful and analyze if they consistently drink alcohol and harder drugs. Most will claim they do not, but most do. Women and men drinking consistently large amounts of alcohol do impact the brain of their offspring. This also means we are an addictive nature and go from one form of addiction to another that sometimes lead us to ignore our children or become aggregators of this issue. Couple this with a striking parallel increase in greed and wanting to have positions of political, economic power such as business analysis degrees rather than mental health and you get this. A nation self destructing due to addiction and mental health conditions. Now I must add Americans used to kill babies if they found defects; and they put them in asylums for any reason at times. So there is also that.