Irrelevant doctorate helpful for a future therapist?

May 7, 2018 2:02 AM

I will be graduating with my master's degree in a counseling field which will allow me to obtain a license to practice independently after accruing a number of hours of work experience which I have already began. My school offers a doctorate in organizational psychology which isn't at all therapy or clinical. However, I really love my school, I would love the idea of using the title of doctor which is ethical according to the licensing board because I wod still practice under my masters level counseling license, and I figure a few extra years of honing my academic writing skills would only be a good thing.

What I'm looking for here is any responses from anyone knowledgeable as to other selling points for me to pursue this degree. I do not consider it as a backup career but if you have information on that that would be interesting.

posted by livelikegold6 to Work & Money (12 answers total)

I’m not going to be looking at your degrees; if my therapist introduces themselves as a dr of psychology, I’m not going to assume it’s organizational psychology and that their practice is under another qualification. I would feel weirded out if/when that was pointed out or in other ways became clear.
posted by Iteki at 2:51 AM on May 7, 2018 [26 favorites]

One potential drawback is if you ever want to work in a public school or organization that has strict pay scales based on degrees, your advanced degree could put you at a disadvantage because you will be too expensive to hire. I know two excellent therapists who wanted to leave private practice and work in public schools but couldn't even get interviews because the doctorate put them at the top of the pay scale.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 2:56 AM on May 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Licensing board aside, I do think calling yourself 'doctor' in this context would be unethical. Heck, the fact that you felt the need to check the rules is a sign that you think so too. I might be be inclined to think differently if your website said something like "livelikegold6, LCSW, PhD", where the LCSW would be a hint the PhD isn't the source of your license, but I don't know that the average person would make that deduction. (Ethical considerations aside, my own bias as someone with a PhD in a subject where calling yourself 'doctor' outside an academic context is unheard of is that I'd think you pompous.)

I think you are also underestimating the drain that doing a PhD is, both mentally and financially. (The "don't do it without funding" advice exists for a reason, but, even with full funding, you're not particularly likely to make up the lost earnings.) Do you really want to sign up to be the world expert in some tiny corner of a subject you're not interested in?
posted by hoyland at 3:41 AM on May 7, 2018 [29 favorites]

I assume you’re under supervision/receiving therapy yourself? I’d recommend exploring why you would “love” to be called Dr and clarifying your goals and reasons for going into therapy.

As a consumer of therapy, I want to see someone who is interested in the counseling process and motivated to help people. I would find a counselor who insisted I call them Dr. Whatever off putting and self-important.
posted by jeoc at 3:44 AM on May 7, 2018 [7 favorites]

Best answer: Don't waste your time getting an irrelevant doctorate when you could instead be establishing yourself in your field and building a career. Setting your career back by 4-6 years just so that you can have different letters in front of your name is a terrible idea. Don't blow half a decade of career advancement on a vanity title.

Also, it might not be officially an ethical breach, but if I had a therapist who went by Dr. and later learned that the doctor part wasn't relevant to their therapy, I would be pretty unhappy about it. I'd consider them to have misrepresented themselves and I'd feel it as a breach of my trust. They probably would no longer be my therapist after that.

I do think it would be unethical to use the title of doctor in your professional practice if it wasn't relevant to that practice. As a hypothetical patient, I don't have to care what the licensing board says. It definitely feels shady to me.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:26 AM on May 7, 2018 [19 favorites]

I’m experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance between your stated career goals, and your stated goals in pursuing this degree. Why do you need to improve your academic writing skills? Are you planning to publish about your patients? Why do you want to be called Dr.? How does this advance the needs of your patients? Pursuing this degree won’t help you establish your practice, or get started on other life goals like making income and saving for a house — basically creating the kind of economic stability that makes for a good therapist – really important so that you’re not hounding people to pay right on time. I would take a little while to sit back and really consider your goals. Maybe you’ve actually discovered that doing therapy is not for you
posted by warriorqueen at 4:35 AM on May 7, 2018 [5 favorites]

Another mark in the "no" column is the fact that if you do get funding, you are consuming from a limited pool of departmental human and financial resources that would otherwise go to a PhD candidate who does indeed want to pursue a career in organizational psychology.
posted by drlith at 5:34 AM on May 7, 2018 [7 favorites]

Your motivations do not seem like good ones to me.

In general I would say a PhD is a terrible backup plan for anything, so put that out of your mind. I would also say that it most fields the experience is meant to initiate you into a certain professional culture and is likely to change your values, or try to. What that means in practice is that after finishing the PhD, if you go out and make use of that counseling degree instead of continuing on the PhD path, you may have a lot of weird and bad feelings about meaning and failure. A friend did something similar (practical Masters, PhD just for interest); she loved the school part but was unable to find a suitable academic job after, and although she’s been steadily employed in the field her first degree was in she’s never been satisfied with it.

Is some of this graduation jitters? Have you had a full-time job yet or have you attended school straight through from HS to BA to MA? The working world is different and worth experiencing before making another educational leap. You can always go back later, perhaps for a PsyD if you like the work, perhaps for something else if you don’t.
posted by eirias at 5:36 AM on May 7, 2018

As someone who happens to have a PhD in organizational psychology (well, technically, organizational behavior), I cannot find strong enough words to describe how much those of us in the field resent clinical psychologists presuming that their training means they are also experts in org psych. If you decide to pursue a PhD in org psych so you can call yourself doctor in your therapy practice, your fellow doctoral students (and faculty as well, in all likelihood) will not be amused.
posted by DrGail at 5:43 AM on May 7, 2018 [8 favorites]

Response by poster: Talk about a smack back to reality. This is why I absolutely love metafilter. The doctor is a terrible idea I get it I get it. I think a lot of this is probably graduation jitters. It wasn't something I was planning on all along it was kind of impromptu. And the poster who said I felt unethical about it from the get-go was correct which is why I checked first and also wanted to run it through a good Community like this. It was great to hear that I would probably put a lot of folks off if I were to do this. Thank you all!
posted by livelikegold6 at 8:05 AM on May 7, 2018 [16 favorites]

Anecdotally, if I were looking at a Psychology Today page and saw Organizational Behavior in the educational background, I'd skip to the next listing.
posted by Smearcase at 8:52 AM on May 7, 2018

Also, for what it's worth, I've seen a lot of master's level licensed mental-health practitioners get eye-rolly about Ph.D./Psy.D. clinical therapists who insist on the "Dr." title. I can't imagine the behind-the-back ridicule that would like happen if a "Dr." therapist didn't have a clinical counseling doctorate. You'd be cutting yourself off from referrals and community by doing that.
posted by lazuli at 7:55 PM on May 7, 2018 [1 favorite]