The AMHP Blog Post Archive
I’m Phillip Crum, TX citizen and co-creator of AMHP, the Association for Mental Health Professionals. Phillips Public Comments Jan 2025 At this very moment the Texas Medical Board, the TMB, is trying to take the medical license of Dr. Mary Talley Bowden. Her crime, her ethical infraction, was to speak up in favor of Covid treatments that the authorities don’t want anyone to talk about: Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. That board was until last week headed by someone that was also on the Planned Parenthood payroll but they were removed after a brief and very vocal 5 day campaign to the governor and atty general’s offices via Twitter. Dr Bowden’s nightmare continues to unfold. The State of TX passed SB 14…
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I’m Kathleen Mills LPC-S and co-creator of AMHP, the Association for Mental Health Professionals. Our profession is deeply divided right now thanks almost entirely to our academic output of the last twenty years. Competent grad students are leaving and changing their career paths because they don’t want to put up with the abuse they’re taking in their university classrooms and these are not isolated incidents. Our board does not need to be flaming the fires of division with DEI initiatives like the 3 hr Cultural Diversity CE requirement. Kathleens Public Comments Jan 2025 This requirement was sold to all 4 BHEC Boards by the SHCC Committee as both a competence issue and a workforce shortage band-aid solution. Liberals redefined “Competence”…
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I decided to pen something on replacing humans with AI because it’s obviously a very hot topic and I think we need to slow down a lot before we act. I am not anti-technology and my jury is still out on the topic of the applications of AI in the mental health field. I do not have all the answers yet and in this article I am simply posing questions that have yet to be answered to my satisfaction. With that in mind I think it prudent to take a slow, wait-and-see approach to this growing area of interest. On Replacing Humans With AI New technology can be a wonderful thing and sometimes its immediate application is a no-brainer. Replacing…
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The New Therapist Supply Chain is a diagram of the birth-to-practice pipeline that supplies our profession with new counselors. It is “the system” through which our new therapists are generated, and it is broken. We use the diagram as a visual aid to analyze the various steps and pitfalls in counselor development. It’s a subs-set of a larger, master diagram but that’s material for another post. Why Bother? Because I can remember things better when they are in diagrammatic form! Each segment of the flow can be analyzed and potential problems can be identified. From there we can compile a list of issues that need attention, prioritize them then determine what must be done at each point in order…
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We believe that there are only two sexes, male and female; that the transgender affirming care issue is a mental health issue with underlying causes that need to be explored, identified, and treated. We believe that grown adults are entitled to determine their own course of action on this topic but we in no way support the GAC protocol from WPATH or any other self-appointed entity, including the writing of letters to greenlight the process in minors. We do not accept or believe the argument that “inclusion” means we have to accept historically recognized mental illness as a normal manifestation of personal choice. A condition’s classification should be built upon peer-reviewed, scientific observation and data, not ideology and feelings. Additional…
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Dealing with political confrontations during the holidays is a perennial issue for a lot of folks. Cousin Eddie inevitably shouts, “Well, how about that election?” I cannot think of a bigger elephant in the room during your next family Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner than recent political events. If it was a local election regarding a couple of bond measures, no problem. But this last presidential election was labeled “the biggest, most influential election in our lifetime”. Each polarized political party drew their line in the sand over a year ago in anticipation of the outcome of this last election. It was a definitive “win/lose” proposition; “The thrill of victory, or the agony of defeat”. Both sides wanted badly to win,…
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A lot of talk about a workforce shortage and ways to increase the number of licensed therapists. But is there really not enough therapists to go around? Let’s see what the numbers say. The Working Variables 32,000,000-Texas citizens 45,000-Licensed LPC and LMFT’s in Texas 20%-Annual active client rate 4-Average number of appts per active client, per year 50-Number of weeks a counselor will work this year. 20-Number of appts per week for a F/T counselor. Running the Equation 32 million citizens divided by 45 thousand active, licensed therapists yields a citizen to therapist ratio of 711:1. (Counting Psychologists and Social Workers only skews the formula outcome even more in favor of no shortage of licensees!) That means there is one…
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We anticipate the mental health crisis in America, and access to mental health providers, will worsen in the foreseeable future (3-5 years) until key systemic and economic issues have been righted. But understanding the workforce shortage and what that really means is key to developing a practical solution rather than one that simply appeases an uninformed public. Understanding the Workforce Shortage We maintain that the “workforce shortage” is not about the number of clinicians or their geographic placement, but is almost entirely about access through corporate chokepoints which are the primary determinant for access and counselor pay structure. We will deal with this vertical chokepoint issue in another post. The phrase “workforce shortage” first needs to be defined. The common…
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