@Glisten wrote:
The Albanese Government will establish a Commonwealth Prac Payment to support students undertaking mandatory workplace placements required for university and vocational education and training qualifications.
Australians studying to be a teacher, a nurse, a midwife or a social worker will be eligible for this payment, but not Psychology students.
@DW_ wrote:
Absolutely. The cost of studying to be a psychologist and reaching registration is high. Why would they not be included?
@Glisten @DW_ TBH, I'd be glad to see a lot of the emphasis taken off of college as the one-and-only route to becoming a therapist.
Instead of making it easier to get the education that's currantly required for someone to be aloud to be a therapist, I'd much prefer to see the government creating new therapist job vacancies that don't come with any educational requirements at all.
For one thing, the currant system creates a staffing bottleneck, in which the understaffed industry of today has to wait another 4 years for any massive influx of new workers to get through the college courses that are demanded for them to get the job (and no doubt, you'll lose a few potential workers there through students dropping out). So that's a major problem.
But far more importantly is that this system whittles down your potential workforce until you've only got one type of person working (at least, in any meaningful role) in the mental health industry: college graduates.
Where does that leave patients who don't want that sort of person for a therapist?
Some of us don't believe that education is a good thing, or a route to "improving" yourself, as others seem to believe. Others might come from families or neighborhoods that contain numerous college graduates, and have found those sorts of people to be self-righteous and full of themselves; qualities we most definitely do not want to be saddled with in a therapist.
Personally, I often picked up vibes that my therapist thought her opinions (often about my life!) were more important then mine, because she'd gone to college and I hadn't. If I ever went into therapy again, I'd want to get the least-educated therapist I could possibly find.
There are a lot of people in despair across the country right now, and I think you'll find that an awful lot of them are less-educated people. And I wouldn't mind betting that a great many of them would love to discover that the helping hand reaching out to them belongs to an uneducated person, just like themselves. Because, as a general rule, the educated class tend not to be particularly kind to the uneducated class, and I think a lot of uneducated patients don't want to endure that judgementalism - or, at the very least - that massive gap in perspective, when they go to a therapist.
A lot of us would prefer to get help from someone who is just like us, who can relate to us, and who share as many of our foundational principals as possible.
So, personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with the government staying the course on how little it's pouring in to mental health education; just so long as it still makes up the gap in worker demand, by hiring people who don't necessarily have any education.
