No longer invisible, psychology students sound like advocates

Bay area students and faculty psychologists rally for more funding and support for training.

By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

More than 600 psy-chology graduate students, training directors and health professionals gathered in San Francisco in late April to raise awareness of the services students provide to their community and the need for increased support for those services.

Organizers of "Psychology Graduate Student Day" sought to mobilize students to advocate for highquality, well-funded psychology training in an era of shrinking training budgets. Their hope is that health agency administrators and politicians--represented at the rally by Mayor Willie Brown and State Senator Jackie Speier, among others--heed students' call.

Speakers at the four-hour rally, held at San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza, emphasized the extent that the Bay area relies on students' work with patients--providing substance-abuse counseling, for example, and crisis-intervention for victims of rape and violence--through internships and practica. Many of the students who provide those services, and who participated in the rally, attend professional schools of psychology that charge up to $15,000 a year, sometimes more, in tuition. Meanwhile their services have traditionally not been compensated by insurers or health-service agencies through paid stipends.

But that setup is becoming increasingly burdensome, said students, faculty and administrators at the event. Because of lower starting salaries in the health-care arena and simultaneous hikes in tuition, today's students incur much heftier debts than did their predecessors, they say.

"We're master's-level people working for free and still having to pay tuition and to eat, clothe and shelter ourselves," said student Bill Collins of the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP)-Alameda. "Medical students once rallied for the same reason and now they're paid a living wage. We should do the same."

Collins and others are also concerned that managed care has squeezed agencies' training budgets, thereby reducing slots for psychologist trainers and threatening the quality of training.

A number of speakers called on politicians to pass legislation that would increase area agencies' training budgets and provide training stipends to students. Mayor Brown made no promises but voiced general support for mental health funding. Speier was more encouraging, expressing concern that medical doctors are paid for their internships, while psychology interns "work more unpaid hours than any other health-care professional."

"You and I know that is not fair," she said. Speier and Brown called on the audience to lobby them and the larger legislative community for increased training support.

"Increased political activism must become a part of your portfolio," Brown told the audience.

The appeal for support

Spearheading and subsidizing the rally was the California Psychology Internship Council (CAPIC), an organization of 90 psychology internship programs, most of which are not accredited by APA. CAPIC Executive Director Gilbert Newman, PhD, organized the event with the assistance of Fatemeh Bani-Taba and other students from the Wright Institute, Berkeley, an APA-accredited training institution for professional psychology. Students and faculty from CSPP-Alameda also played a significant role in planning the event.

Newman geared the rally mainly for the northern California psychology community, hit particularly hard by reduced training resources. But he hopes it spurs other parts of the country with unrecognized, underfunded psychology students to follow suit.

The public is largely unaware of graduate psychology students' contributions, says Erika Falk, a Wright Institute student who helped organize the event and introduced a speaker. Many people don't know that students provide up to 6,000 hours of free service--roughly three years of full-time work--to the community before licensure, she says. Nor do they realize that graduate students work with many of the community's most disadvantaged people, helping them overcome substance abuse, propensity for violence and other such problems.

"The problem is that we--and the work we do--are invisible, and so are the patients on whose behalf we work," says Falk. "And to the extent that we can raise awareness that our tuition is helping an underprivileged population--to the extent that we can advocate for ourselves--we can advocate for our patients."

Decreased government funding for public services threatens students' training to help that population, said psychologist Edward Bourg, PhD, director of professional training at CSPP-Alameda and a speaker at the rally. A number of Bay area agencies have cut back hiring of psychologist supervisors. As a result, some training programs have dropped in quality or have been altogether eliminated. In the past six months alone, CSPP has seen a 10 percent drop in the number of area agencies that provide psychologist-supervised training to students.

"What started out as a rally for stipends may need to end up being a rally for the status quo," said Bourg. "We need basic quality training, modeling and mentoring by psychologists. If we don't have that, we're in real trouble."

He and other speakers at the rally appealed to community foundations and legislators to increase training funds for agencies and to provide stipends and loan relief to psychology students in return for their services.

The call for activism

Responding to the pleas for support, Brown made no mention of bolstering support for psychology students, but nevertheless said that their services are invaluable, that the local health-care delivery system "would die without you, would be ineffective without you." Speier went a step further by noting her support for increased government funding of health care and education. And she called on psychology students to lobby political leaders, who "have the ability to re-evaluate internships."

Newman, also the field-placement director at the Wright Institute, hopes to see psychology students follow Speier's advice.

"Not only were we trying to reach policy-makers, but we were trying to bring home to the students themselves that they have a vested interested in becoming advocates, that we all need to mobilize," said Newman. The message he wants students to get across is, "We're here, don't forget us. We're serving an important role in the system."Y



Read our privacy statement and Terms of Use

Cover Page for this Issue

PsychNET®
© 1999 American Psychological Association

APA Home Page . Search . Site Map