Phillips LPC Board Meeting Comments 9-20-24
I'm Phillip Crum, Texas citizen and co-founder of AMHP.
I wanted to know more about the origins of the 3Hr cultural diversity requirement so I did a little digging and here's what I found.
What is the SHCC?
1. The Statewide Health Coordinating Council is a group of people who's purpose, near as I can tell, is to act as a kind of an information liaison between the legislative and executive groups including BHEC. One of their tasks is to produce the "Texas State Health Plan" which is required by the TX Health & Safety Code Sec. 104. That document makes non-binding recommendations to various boards and councils which may choose to adopt their recommendations or may not. This includes BHEC.
2. There are NO Texas laws on the books requiring that BHEC licensees take diversity courses.
3. Recently the TX Legislature passed two Senate Bills, 14 and 17 that are moving the TX government and the people AWAY from the Woke/DEI and transgender care for minors issues.
4. The SHCC made the DEI recommendation for required diversity education under the guise of addressing the TX Workforce shortage. If we can't find enough bodies then we need to force the licensees we have to become competent in all areas regardless of their moral positions. THAT'S a potential constitutional problem.
5. In the almost two years now since this rule was implemented I have yet to hear one board member mention that the Diversity requirement was done to alleviate a workforce shortage problem. That tells me that the OFFICIAL reason driving this rule's placement was a lot of smoke, and something else was driving it.
6. Somewhere along the approval process someone apparently knew it might create too much backlash from licensees so you added the phrase, "but not limited to..." so you could say, "but you can take anything you want".
Okay...
- If I can take anything I want and the BHEC staff is going to be very lenient as to what counts as diversity, why is the rule necessary at all, if everything counts? We didn't need a rule to make it ok to take a ce workshop on kink, bondage or any number of other topics and call that a counseling education. They were free to take that before you implemented the Cultural Diversity requirement.
- Also, you effectively neutered the rule and did an end-run around it's primary objective which is to make the topics the SHCC wants taken, required.
- And how does this help with the headcount of the overall workforce shortage? It doesn't.
A Quick Peek at The Text
Let's look at the actual text of the recommendation from the SHCC Health Plan from the 2011-2016 version:
Quote "while the demand for services continues to grow, the need for CULTURALLY COMPETENT services will become more apparent." End-Quote
Dr Dawn Irons likes to say, "Words matter" and indeed they do. Especially their definitions.
"Competence" used to mean that you held and could demonstrate mastery over a specific topic. The left has redefined it to mean knowledge in all topics; that you must accept all clients that walk through your door and you must be knowledgeable about every issue they present even if it offends your moral stance. According to them you're not allowed to specialize and refer a client out to someone else anymore or their tactic is to call you a racist, homophobe, transphobic, xenophobe or worse until you comply.
It goes on to say, Quote "Policies and rules are needed to REQUIRE continuing education across all types of providers (they could have stopped there having stated their point but they add) Quote to ensure that this training does not continue to be optional." End-Quote They so badly want this universal competence training to be required that they stated it twice.
Counselors have already been judged competent in diversity during grad school. Does the ham-fisted recommendation to require on-going cultural diversity camps mean that academia is graduating INcompetent grads in this area right now? Because if they're competent, why do we need this training?
It continues, Quote "Mental health professions have not adequately recruited individuals from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds." End-Quote
First, the underlying premise here is that those mean white people are conspiring somehow to keep non-white people out of the profession and that's ridiculous. Those mean white women spend all their time worrying about how to keep their heads above water not oppressing other people.
Second, the mental health licensees that make up this profession are not charged with "recruiting" minorities into the field. Academia is responsible for that. Licensees only supervise and/or hire the workforce that academia makes available. The blame for the headcount shortage is being placed at the feet of licensees so remedial CE topics historically and rightly viewed as mental illness could then be assigned and normalized.
Third, the fallacy that diversity is the answer to the workforce headcount shortage is ridiculous. That the workforce is currently made up predominantly, but not limited to, white women only means that there are fewer women or men of color desiring to enter the field in the first place. Diversity, a subjectively proper mix of people by skin color, will do nothing to increase the overall number of people in the workforce it will only lower the bar of competency as it has traditionally been defined.
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About the Author
Phillip's background has blessed him with a variety of interests, skills, and tools to get things done. He spent 25 years in the printing and marketing industry before meeting Kathleen Mills in 2015. They quickly figured out that they made a pretty good business team and, owing to Kathleen's story, embarked upon a mission that would see the creation of PracticeMentors.us and eventually the Association for Mental Health Professionals.
Thanks Phillip. There was a time when competence was determined by meeting a set of empirically based metrics that demonstrated some minimum level of competence in the theory. Seems we are now in an era in which competence is determined by adherence to an ideology, even in the absences of evidence. Would like to see the statistical basis for the idea that critical theory forms the basis for effective mental health treatment across all cultures.