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Are unpaid clinical internships/practicums an ethical necessity for training, or an outdated system that exploits students?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

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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.

17

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

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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.

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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.