Jeanne's Reviews > Careers in Mental Health: Opportunities in Psychology, Counseling, and Social Work

This is part of a review written for and solicited by the online journal PsycCRITIQUES.

Kim Metz's Careers in Mental Health: Opportunities in Psychology, Counseling, and Social Work is written for an audience of undergraduate psychology or other mental health majors. It is too narrow for a Careers course, as it solely focuses on the helping professions, but it might be a good supplementary text for an Intro to Counseling course. It might also be a good text for faculty who are advising students about graduate school and are confused by the variety of apparently similar professions out there – clinical, counseling, and school psychology, guidance counseling, social work, licensed professional counseling. I am a clinical psychologist, have worked in the field for 25 years, and advised students about these fields for most of that period and still, as a result of reading this book, better understood issues I've talked about and taught for years.

Careers in Mental Health is a bit of a hodge-podge of a book. The first half focuses on specific careers, the second on general issues (e.g., why/why not to enter one of the mental health professions, applying to graduate school, critical thinking, ethics). I would probably use the chapters out of order if I were teaching (I generally do), and would probably use several of the later chapters before the first half of the book.

Metz's response to many of the questions she raises about the mental health fields is, "It depends, it's confusing." There are real philosophical differences among fields, although these differences may be as much or more about the specific type of work or the setting within which parties work. She does a nice job outlining the philosophical ideas underlying the fields, although I kept wanting a visual map illustrating philosophical influences on fields across time.

Understanding the mental health fields is complicated by the fact that some of the data that we would like is unavailable. We know median incomes from the Occupational Outlook Handbook, but who are these employees and how long have they been working? In what parts of the country? In what settings? These things make a difference, as seen when comparing income data shared by AAMFT, which reports higher incomes earned by marriage and family therapists (MFT) than reported by the Occupational Outlook Handbook. Presumably MFTs who are members of AAMFT are not representative of the general population. Metz does a good job indicating some of these complications.

While some mental health professionals do quite well financially, I don't think one should enter the field primarily for financial reasons (see Metz's chapter on why/why not to pursue a mental health degree). Enter because it is your passion and consistent with your values, offering the kind of work environment that suits you. Under these conditions, it can be deeply satisfying and rewarding work.