It's really a bummer that everyone who seems like a halfway decent MH provider is doing private pay only.

I understand all the challenges and complexities that insurance brings, but in a mental health care system where the majority of providers simply aren't actually that skilled and where the ongoing quiet crisis of late stage capitalism is grinding us all to dust, it'd be cool if folks with genuine empathy didn't reserve it for a narrow socioeconomic demographic. I'm just perplexed by the number of people doing it who have all these leftist, socialist values and then...

I have a decent job with good insurance and a ton of debt so while I'm probably squarely middle class, I can't afford it and a lot of people are a lot worse off than me.

The whole field feels like such a sham in so many ways but this is just one of those ways coming from a group of people I wouldn't expect whose values and practice don't seem to match up.

Agree/ disagree?

Originally posted by u/sabo_cat_x on Reddit.

Top comment by u/Rebsosauruss

I used to feel exactly this way. I'd get resentful when private pay therapists charged their full rate and wonder how that could ever be fair or sustainable for clients.

Over time I've come to see it the opposite way. If we don't value care work, including our own, we feed the same system that underpays and burns out the people doing it. Therapists charging a living rate isn't the problem. A system that doesn't fund mental health care is.

Accessibility still matters to a lot of us. Many therapists offer sliding scales, like the Green Bottle method, so people can pay based on their actual resources. It's worth asking about when you reach out.

And when I noticed how much resentment came up for me around this, it turned out to be worth getting curious about where it was coming from.