Referrals to therapists in your local area below:
Therapist employment notices below:
Mental Health Links below:
Click here and fund free mammograms for low-income women: PREVENT CANCER
You can participate in a lobby to end discrimination by insurance companies and government against LPC's and LMFT's, in favor of MSW's.
Please send your comments to new.id (at) sbcglobal.net.
You can also aid by cross-posting to newsgroups, to let other therapists know about this site. You can establish class action lawsuits in your state against federal and state agencies practicing unfair discriminiation.
If you are a policyholder of Blue Cross or other insurance which practices such discrimination, you can file a class action suit against that company, for denying you access to a free choice of mental health care. You can circulate our e-mail petition (below.)
Around 1980, chiropractors in Oklahoma filed a class action lawsuit in order to obtain 3rd party reimbursement. We can do the same. Nobody else is going to do it for us.
In the early 1990's, Texas passed a Freedom of Choice law, in regard to a policyholder's right to choose his therapist. In 1998, Alaska passed a similar law. An LPC can now be reimbursed by Blue Cross in Texas and Alaska, but not in Oklahoma. What LPC's in Texas and Alaska have achieved, others can achieve, too.
You can also help by seeking out other sites, and other associations with goals similar to this one, and letting us know about it.
To add your opinion to this page, write: new.id (at) sbcglobal.net"> new.id (at) sbcglobal.net.
Over
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If you are a Licensed Professional Counselor, or a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, you know what you had to achieve in order to attain that license.
Yet according to several entities, you are unqualified to provide mental health services. Those same entities, however, say that a social worker IS qualified to render those services. Does this make sense?
In fact, a social worker typically has less mental health training
than the typical LPC or LMFT. Most of an MSW's training is in social welfare, administration, community organization, history, philosopy and field experience.
A little bit of training is left over for mental health.
Yet only social workers are allowed to do
mental health work in VA hospitals. Only social workers and those with an M.S or MMFT, regardless of coursework on others' transcripts, are allowed to do therapy in family violence programs for the U. S. Army.
However, an M.S. or MMFT must have a license if the Army supervisor is not licensed. An unlicensed social worker can do therapy there, whether the supervisor is licensed or not.
Update: Very recently (10/00) the Army has decided to fire all LPC's and LMFT's and replace them with social workers. This is not required by law, but is a policy decision made by social workers serving the Army. Yet work with the Army's Mental Health departments and Family Advocacy departments especially requires mental health skills.
Update:
CHIROPRACTIC GROUP GETS GREEN LIGHT TO SUE HHS A federal court has ruled that the American Chiropractic Association (ACA) may sue the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over guidelines that the ACA says virtually exclude chiropractic services from the Medicare+Choice program.
If they can do it, WE can do it!
Blue cross in many states pays social workers for mental
health work, but will not pay an LPC or LMFT.
(Medicare page requires Adobe Acrobat)
Medicare pays only social workers and psychologists for mental health services. Medicaid in many states favors social workers.
An Oklahoma consortium of insurance companies allows 3rd party payments only to social workers.
CHAMPUS pays social workers, psychiatric nurses, and LMFT's, but requires that an LPC have a physician's referral.
(CHAMPUS page requires Adobe Acrobat.)
In Oklahoma, the social work lobby persuaded
the governor to veto a bill allowing LMFT's to do family therapy for runaway children, on the ground that "LMFT's were incompetent", according to the governor.
The social work lobby had told the governor that MSW's have 60 hours of credit, while LMFT's have only 45. They forgot to tell him that most of those 60 hours have nothing to do with therapy, much less, family therapy. 36 hours are practicum, and about half of the remaining 24 are for mental health. Some social workers never take a class in family therapy, and some never take a class in therapy, period.
In the meantime, there has hardly been an organized peep from LPC's or LMFT's about any of this. Most of our professional associations are not interested in these issues, so we must form our own association to exclusively address this matter, ourselves. Keep in mind that many therapists work for agencies, and have no concern about certain issues.
Please add your opinion to this page, by writing to: new.id (at) sbcglobal.net.
What is needed to correct this situation? For one thing, FREEDOM OF CHOICE LAWS in each state, can require that a patient can seek treatment from any licensed person, with a similar education and profession, without interference from the insurance ompanies. This requires organized lobbying, which requires contact and communication of indiviuals who must be allied in order to do this.
Another reasonable response is to contact our congresspersons, and senators, in concert, to alert them of the unfairness of government regulations, not only to the practioners, but to the consumer and taxpayer as well. By limiting the source of mental
health services, an artificial inflation of the cost to the taxpayer is created.
LPC's & LMFT's: (other than zip 73501-7) Place your own referral data here, free of charge.
Send your data to: LMFT@geocities.com. Clients will be referred from another website (geocities.com/HotSprings/3616/MentalHealth.html)
EXCHANGE A LINK! Send us your website address, and place ours on
your website! We'll post yours here! Just write in our address,
with
(a href="http://geocities.datacellar.net/HotSprings/3616") THE POLITICAL THERAPIST (/a)
substituting angle brackets <> for the parentheses, and that's all there is to it! You've made a link! Let us know, and we'll link to you from here!
1. Contribute YOUR ideas as to what we can do.
2. Advertise the location of this website on search engines, newsgroups, at conventions and seminars, using flyers, buttons, (name tag holders)and business cards to advertise the issue and the website.
3. Mail letters to LPC's and LMFT's soliciting $1 or $5 to finance future mailings.
4. Use your directory of licensed therapists to organize a state organization, and local chapters.
5. Obtain as many officers and committee members as possible, to distribute the workload.
6. Link your site to this one, and to the ACA site (below) *
7. Check my link below on the American Counseling Association.
For more detail, go to ACA Govt Affairs , or just ACA .
8. Find other sites similar to this, and let us know about them! And let them know about us!
9. Stay in touch with others of like mind, at CounsGrads, listed below, or on the newsgroup
Talk To Each Other!
10. File a class action suit in your state against a state or federal agency which is discriminating against you, or sue your own insurance company (class action) for not allowing you to choose your provider.
11. Send me an e-mail to lmft@geocities.com with permission to post it on this site.
12. Don't give up! We need you, and we all need each other!
13. Participate!
14. Participate in simultaneous, targeted letter writing campaigns. Use #18 below to start!
15. Get your state counseling association involved. If your state doesn't have an association, see what it takes to start one!
16. Circulate a petition. See the e-mail chain letter for this purpose. (Multiply your effect by millions!)
17. Go to http://www.thirdvoice.com Third Voice join, and place this URL on other websites relating to psychology.
18. Join the ACA LISTSERV mailing list above, to receive current alerts for governmental action.
19. In Oklahoma, call (405)665-4385 and offer to help, or write to 7 10th NW, Ardmore, OK 73401.
20. Advocate to the Health Department that they solicit and publish e-mail addresses of LPC's and LMFT's, so that they can communicate more easily with one another.
Put the following on your own website!
(A HREF="http://geocities.datacellar.net/hotsprings/3616") THE POLITICAL THERAPIST(/a)
Cut and paste, and then substitute angle brackets < > for the parentheses. I used parentheses so
the brackets would not be invisible to you here. Just click and drag to mark the lines you want to copy,
go to Edit, click copy, and then go to your own webpage.
To link to the American Counseling Association, use the pattern above,
with
(a href="http://www.counseling.org/gr/govaaff.htm")ACA (/a)
for the address.
To reduce loading time, the second half of this page has been moved to:
If you have problems copying the white print on this page on paper, copy it to your word processor, and then print that on paper. Or just go to the top and download the B&W version of the page.
Also, please let us know of links which have become obsolete.
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Links to other sites on the Web
