Perspectives of a Clinical Psychology Professor

As a psychotherapist and state college clinical psychology professor, I know that mental health problems are enormously overdetermined and complex. Many scholars make their careers trying to map these interacting issues that produce suffering and incapacitate people; many of these issues are beyond the scope of our union to directly address. However, there are many salient issues that are within our power to address. These include:

1. DEBT. My students at MCLA are made enormously anxious by their student debt. It is not at all clear to them that they will see a return on their investment in their education, particularly if they fall into a financial crisis, become disabled, or are called to a low-paid field like social work or teaching. They find this terrifying, unjust, and mainly outside of their control. The anxiety this produces often majorly hampers their capacity to engage in their education, to the point that they wind up on academic probation or expelled. I have had multiple advisees fail out of school because of this very issue just this year. If we sent students to college debt-free, we would remove this major determinant of psychological suffering.

2. A LACK OF CAPABLE PROVIDERS. Training to be a psychotherapist is tremendously challenging and expensive; universities mint money with MA and PsyD degrees that provide weak training, leaving many providers under-equipped to address the complex issues that constitute general practice in mental health today, particularly with BIPOC and LGBTQ+ patients. Our state colleges struggle to hire providers who are up to the task of treating our students, because they pay something on the order of 50% of what clinicians earn in private practice and because they require them to see too many students for too short a duration to make a real difference. Too many of our communities do not have local providers who can treat our students, in part because MassHealth fees for services bear no resemblance to the actual market costs of psychotherapy. This issue is an order of magnitude more severe for minor children, because MassHealth puts all manner of onerous demands on providers who see children.

3. LACK OF AFFORDABLE FOOD AND HOUSING. If you do not know where you will sleep tonight, or next month, you cannot be psychologically healthy. If you do not know where your next meal will come from, you cannot be psychologically healthy. This should be entirely obvious--how would any of us feel in such a situation?

4. DISCRIMINATION. It is established psychological fact that experiencing discrimination is bad for our mental health.

5. THEFT OF ATTENTION. Many factors contribute to the theft of our students' attention--social media is a major factor, but so are the kinds of "bandwidth taxes" (per Mullainathan and Shafir) that bedevil poor people, people with disabilities, and other people who are forced into contact with complex bureaucracies to meet their basic survival needs, as many of our students are. When so many forces are stealing and weakening the attention of my students, it makes it enormously difficult to teach them. My students routinely earn bad grades because they cannot do the reading--because they are anxious, distracted, and often because (as many students told me) they have not read a full book in many years. At a minimum, our union can help to reduce theft of attention committed by our educational institutions--for example, by minimizing onerous administrative requirements to maintain matriculation and state aid--as well as fighting to reduce these kinds of "bandwidth taxes" throughout Commonwealth social services.

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