Reclaiming Competency in the Mental Health Profession
Let's talk about reclaiming competency. Twenty-five years ago all 50 states did away with oral exams required to display competency prior to licensure as a mental health counselor. 60% of examinees failed those oral exams. That's more a statement about how well their academic institutions prepared them for their career than anything having to do with cultural background, gender, or (insert your favorite virtue signal here), than it is about anyone's ability to test fairly.
Social activists have cried for so long about "fair" and "feelings", that logical, common sense barriers to competent, competitive superiority (merit-based work) were removed.
So we limited the licensing requirement to passing a standardized written test and opened the door to professional incompetency. So much for protecting the public. You can read far more about this in this Substack article by Rick McCarty LMFT, who served on the oral exam board in California for 20 years and helped write the exams and testing vignettes.
The Gate to Incompetency
Two primary reasons were given for this move. One, the oral exams somehow presented a career roadblock to those who couldn't demonstrate competency. (Wasn't that the point??)
Two, the issue of a claimed workforce shortage. We don't have a headcount shortage in the field. We have skill-resource allocation issues but, again, that goes back to the need for academia to steer people away from over-populated or dead-end career paths, into professional niches that need more attention.
We've Hobbled Competency Through Cheating
Competency in the mental health field requires rigorous academic training. Entry into the profession requires proof of that training in both a written format (testing) and through live, interpersonal displays of understanding (oral exams). Both have their advantages in determining competency and neither of them can be sacrificed in the name of social expediency. That's cheating. But that's exactly what we've done and Joe Citizen is paying the price.
Recall the 60% who failed the oral exams? They are now licensed in some state and practicing their incompetence on the public. A healthcare discipline that bases a vast majority of its' foundational approach on "social justice" is criminal. There's nothing scientific about it nor does it self-correct based on outcomes. We removed the last, great safety barrier to entry into a medical profession in order to make it easier for unqualified people to get in. That's cheating.
The Road Back to Competency
Common sense is linear, it takes you on a logical path to completion. "Stupid" is circular and always ends up boomeranging on those who practice it. That's happening both in the academic arena and the MH profession right now.
Here's a growing, and very much related, problem which illustrates my point. AI has made it very easy for students at all academic levels to cheat on homework and exams. They are unwittingly training themselves to be incompetent in a subject and robbing themselves of the critical thinking skillset.
So, how are professors combatting that? You guessed it, they're giving oral exams! Why? Technology has made cheating so much easier (which only accelerates incompetency) that the only path left to educators is to remove the technology and associated paper output, from the testing equation.
Fortunately there are still some professors left who give a damn about the product they're putting out. They've circled back to what works, to what weeds out the unprepared, the poorly prepared, the cheaters. They're talking to their students face-to-face, in-person and requiring they demonstrate a solid grasp of the course topic in order to pass. What a concept!
Summary
Okay, the bottom line is this: the great 25 year social experiment that placed feelings over facts, fairness and equality of outcome over competency is over and it has failed miserably. Cultural Marxism has failed (again).
Mental health counseling is all about science and interpersonal trust relationships. We don't protect the public by sacrificing science and advancing a political agenda (or redefining "competent"), in-school or post-grad, at the cost of competent therapists. Giving the public a quasi-version of mental health counseling, "Counseling-Lite", is nothing more than the best Marxism has to offer.
We protect the public by ensuring through the human element that those whom we license have fully demonstrated subject-matter competency. This includes the ability to interact with patients, something you can't test for in the writtens.
Professors who care recognize the need for orals to circumvent the cheating and inevitable incompetency, and are returning to what has worked in the past. We must bring back some form of oral examinations at the licensing level, exams not run, monitored, developed or supervised by the people who caused this problem in the first place.
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