Occupy Student Debt

Many psychotherapists are dealing with being un(der)employed and having massive student loan debt.  If you personally are not then I'm guessing you have friends who are.  In my experience people often deal with these fears privately which leads to less chances for solidarity.  I'd like to live in a world where people aren't alone with highly emotional and highly complex issues.  Here are stories of other people facing student loan debt pressures.  Feel free to submit your own.

OccupyStudentDebt.com

African American Psychiatric History

Vanessa Jackson discusses her research on African American psychiatric history and the importance of creating opportunities for marginalized communities to tell their own stories. She shares the lessons she learned from her conversations with mental health consumer/survivors/ex-patients and the potential for creating new healing strategies.

 She talks about three "magic questions" she asked psychiatric survivors:  1)  What happened to you?  2)  How has what happened still affecting you now?  3)  What do you need to heal?

National Health Service Corps Database

National Health Service Corps

A searchable national database of mental health jobs in high-need areas. Not sure if they have positions for interns but it may be a useful resource nonetheless.

New Jobs/Internship Organizations Posted

New organizations posted:

Horizons Family Counseling

San Francisco Therapy Collective

Adolescent Counseling Services

Intern Process Group Forming

Alexis Kalikman is starting a process group for interns and asked if I would let people know about it. Here's the info:

It will be a process group covering issues specific to pre-licensed therapists and the intern experience.

The group will run 8 weeks on Tuesday evenings 6-7:30p, June 7th through
July 26th. The group counts toward personal psychotherapy hours for BBS
licensing for MFT interns. The cost of the group is $30.00 a session. We
require an 8 week commitment.

If you know anyone who might benefit from attending this group, please pass
this information on. Thank you.

--
Alexis Kalikman, MFT
KalikmanLloyd Therapy Group
415-674-1996
2302A Fillmore Street

Gerry Grossman or AATBS for MFT Exam Prep?

In short: Gerry Grossman by far.


First off, the people I've talked to all said that the practice exam test bank questions were the most helpful part of the exam prep.

AATBS lets you use their testbank questions for only three months! Gerry Grossman lets you access their test questions for an entire year. AATBS did not make it very clear that they had a three month policy. I've talked to others who were surprised and angry about it after already paying the $700 to $1000 fee.

AATBS has less practice exams than Grossman for both the written and clinical vignette exam. I think the AATBS written exam has five or six sample tests and Grossman has nine. Since most of the exam prep involves taking and retaking lots of practice exams Grossman wins here too.

AATBS questions seemed to have a lot of quality control issues. A lot of questions were confusing, unnecessarily difficult, and ended up being less helpful than Grossman for getting a feel of the actual exam. Especially for the cinical vignette exam, AATBS test questions were extremely confusing and people I've talked to say they learned very little from them. Those who used both methods relied almost exclusively on Grossman.

Some people thought the actual exam was harder than the Grossman practice exams and some thought it was easier. For the clinical vignette, however, everyone I know thought it was more confusing than Grossman but less confusing than AATBS.

One person said they thought AATBS had better study books than Grossman. Like I said, I thought the study books played a small role in the actual exam preparation process.

I haven't heard a comparison between Grossman and AATBS on their workshops so I can't speak to that.

If you had other experiences please leave a comment.

Hope this helps!