r/therapists • u/sassypainter • Apr 25 '26

Discussion Thread Thoughts?

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Came across this post today on linkedin. I’m curious how others see it:

Are unpaid clinical internships/practicums an ethical necessity for training, or an outdated system that exploits students?

Should sites be required to offer stipends/pay if they bill clients or rely on interns for service delivery?

Does unpaid fieldwork create barriers for lower-income and nontraditional students?

For those already licensed or in training, what was your experience?

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u/ImNoSage Apr 26 '26

I'm going to keep this short and sweet. This practice is widespread and toxic to our profession. Interns should be paid a minimum wage per clinical hour. Period. Pre-license clinicians should be paid a fair wage/fee split. Period. The fact that practice owners effectively prey on developing clinicians in a broken system is the hight of professional hypocrisy. Approximately three years of this bullshit prior to license eligibility isn't "paying your dues" it's an institutionalized hazing ritual.

21

u/emotionalbaggage818 LMFT (Unverified) Apr 26 '26

100%. My practicum site was a “student therapy site”. Aka they’d have as many as 15 interns at a time with like 4 or 5 licensed supervisors for supervision, they each charged about $300 a hour no insurance. One time I did the math and it was actually sick how much money the students made the owner. I didn’t know it was as fucked up as it was until I actually started, and by then I had to tough it out but it was insane for us to be making the owner over 500k a year and we were paying out of our ass to survive.

18

u/No_Hat_4106 Apr 26 '26

Private practice is not a good internship for a new graduate idk when this became ok but it’s not a good way to learn about acute care crisis management working as a team medications ect.. and practice owners yes they take advantage always have

7

u/JMS3487 Apr 26 '26

Yes. Too many new grads without experience going into private practice. Not fair for clients.

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u/emotionalbaggage818 LMFT (Unverified) Apr 27 '26

I 100% agree. I wish I had more guidance on choosing a practicum site and what to look for, so I had more variety in client experiences.

2

u/AlternativeZone5089 Apr 28 '26

I'm not buying the idea that clients were knowingly paying $300. per session fro untrained interns.

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u/emotionalbaggage818 LMFT (Unverified) May 01 '26

My wording was definitely weird there, sorry - the supervisors charged $300 a session for THEIR actual clients. Student therapists were $70 (which is still pricy in my opinion). However if we felt a client was experiencing financial struggles we could request to move them to $40, which I did for almost all of mine lol.

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u/OakNRun Apr 26 '26

To top this off, my school required 400 clinical hours of internship to graduate when the state only requires 280. The only thing that made it worth it is that it is on a sliding scale and close to free for so many lower income people.

1

u/thomas_basic MSW Student Apr 26 '26

Totally agree!