Article: ‘I spent £80,000 to retrain’: Why so many people are becoming therapists

[Sly Saint]

Heather Darwall-Smith was happy in her career as an advertising art director when, at 29, a yoga retreat changed her life. She explains, “I was going through a very painful period: I was struggling to conceive and had experienced pregnancy loss. The retreat was run by a couple who bought the site in their fifties and spent around 30 years developing it. I found that profoundly inspiring. It showed me that a major change did not have to happen early in life and that it was possible to build a life around values, community and wellbeing.” During the retreat, however, another guest experienced significant mental health difficulties. It became clear to Darwall-Smith that good intentions and a peaceful setting were not enough: anyone running a retreat also needed the training and judgment to respond safely if somebody became psychologically unwell. That was the moment the idea took shape. She thought, “I will retrain as a psychotherapist and, one day, perhaps build a retreat centre of my own.” The retreat-centre plan eventually fell away, but the decision to become a psychotherapist remained and she began training at 42.

Having been in therapy at various points in her life, Heather knew how powerful it could be and found herself increasingly drawn towards work that involved depth, meaning and sustained human connection. There was also a sense of security in working in a therapeutic setting, as demand for therapy increased. Driven in part by reduced stigma and greater awareness of mental health issues, over 80 per cent of therapists report operating at full capacity, and there’s a real need for more trained practitioners to help those in need.

Darwall-Smith is far from alone in retraining in the mental health field. Data from the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) found that from April 2020 to 2023, membership rose by 27 per cent. And in 2021, 24 per cent of applicants to the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology course were aged 30 to 49.

The increased demand for therapy means that sometimes people seek advice from those who are not adequately trained, Darwall-Smith explains. “In the UK, anyone can call themselves a psychotherapist; it’s not a protected term, like nurse or midwife. That’s a genuinely alarming situation when you consider how vulnerable people are when they reach out for help. I take my accreditation with the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) seriously. It means I’m insured, I’m bound by a code of ethics, and there are processes in place if something goes wrong.”

MSN

 

[rvallee]

It's often framed as a good thing, "go to therapy" has pretty much become a positive meme, but I see this growth of therapy everywhere for everyone as signs of a decaying society. Therapy is not human connection, it's not social, it's not friendship. It's a business, it's purely transactional. None of this replaces real human interaction, let alone the kind that veers into friendship and more.

Even if it were generally better, it's still a bad thing for a society to have destroyed so much of its social fabric that people have to pay for a shoddy substitution. To have someone solve problems, sure, but the vast majority of people don't need that, because most problems either don't have simple and easy solutions, or they do and there is no need to pay someone for it.

It serves as a similar sign as shark loans and pawn shops are a sign of economic hardship in a community, the more you see of them, the more the economic/social fabric is brittle and rotting, and it's as poor a solution as their economic equivalent. It's like the rise of AI companions in a social crisis of loneliness.

I don't think that's a common opinion, at least outside the disabled community, and even then, but it's something I can't deny anymore, and it's more obvious as the industry grows. Eventually it will likely be shown that AI therapists are just as good. Maybe then people will see how hollow this all is. Sometimes a good idea becomes bad when it gets that big, applied to things it has no business being involved in.

 

[bobbler]

I struggle with what feels selective story telling in these things that relate almost explicitly to career changes to only the professions that are bps or mind body.

Any other career and the main reasons people change career would not be chosen to be hidden and so obviously therefore go begging. 29 is very early in a career she was thinking about changing to run a retreat. 42 is when she apparently then retrained which feels like a common point where lots of people go part time or look for flexibility eg due to having had children or if married having those options as the partners career allows for one to take a step back. Or because people want to move out of a big city and do a job that’s therefore possible in different parts of the country.

But the gap without explanation makes it not feel like it adds up as well or sound as serious as its spiel about going the official route makes it claim to be without then putting in those details/facts/context to me.

It’s weird not discussing this or the hours involved - people really have to make pretty functionally decisions about their career and that’s I guess why a 29yr didn’t buy a retreat to run instead of carrying on with their current job too.

These gaps makes the rest sound more disingenuous than it might actually be by doing this. Because even if someone retrained as a nurse from being a ceo or whatnot then you’d get discussion about what pros vs cons for them there were.

And it would have said how many years of training doing what course etc after the big spiel about how this one did the proper route to be a qualified and licensed psychotherapist

Maybe I’m missing part of a story that was elsewhere originally and got cherry-picked down or something.

Because titling it as spending £80k to retrain without detailing how it cost that seems a bit unusual ..?

 

[Trish]

It doesn't seem odd to me. The bit quoted from the article in the opening posts says she did a doctorate in clinical psychology. That would be pretty expensive and likely to take at least 3 years. I have known plenty of people who have retrained in their 30's and 40's for completely different professions.

 

[bobbler]

It doesn't seem odd to me. The bit quoted from the article in the opening posts says she did a doctorate in clinical psychology. That would be pretty expensive and likely to take at least 3 years. I have known plenty of people who have retrained in their 30's and 40's for completely different professions.

You don’t normally pay fees as a home student (I just checked it hadn’t randomly changed) and Those I know who did the clinical psychology doctorate had funded places. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was easy for unis to just expand by pushing self-fund places either as it isn’t a straightforward classroom taught course, and you tend to have to have already been working as an assistant psychologist type position or have enough experience as well as the other required qualifications (psychology degree that is BPS qualifying ) first

 

[StellariaGraminea]

From the article "Darwall-Smith estimates that the training cost at least £80,000, as it took six years to complete the master’s degree in mindfulness-based psychotherapy alone."

I googled her online and she seems to imply that's her main training, i.e. an MA in mindfulness-based psychotherapy, and did some course later on "sleep medicine" & CBT also. I've nothing against psychotherapy if people find it helpful, though not personally convinced. I've a relative who trained in it but never ended up using it, though it seems to have been a helpful qualification for various jobs (i.e. interviewers really liked the idea of hiring someone with this training).

What struck me was that it seemed a very unsustainable career in terms of the overhead costs (including expectations of paying a supervisor, your own therapy, obviously insurance, premises, etc.) while at the same time being limited in the no. of patients you can see because it's so intense. Maybe I'm wrong and it probably differs by country, but it seemed from my family member's experience that to realistically work as one, you need to have independent financial support and it wasn't a paying career in itself. (Talking about psychotherapy rather than psychology which has it's own pay structure, and often you can work for an organisation etc. so very different - though again different countries different rules).