When I started this podcast / blog a few months ago, I was in grad school for Clinical Mental Health Counseling. 2 weeks ago, I decided to leave that program. Some of my reasons are professional, and some are quite personal. I’m sharing the bulk of those reasons here because I often encounter alternative healers who are considering going down the academic path as I did, and I imagine my experience might help some people make the right decision for them.
For many, that will mean going all the way through grad school and getting the licensure and all that. One of my dearest friends who started the program with me is sticking with it and I’m so excited that she will be bringing her perspectives into the profession. I think having change-makers on the inside, so-to-speak is how the clinical mental health world is changing for the better. Which is one of the reasons I entered the program in the first place, I wanted to be a part of that change from the inside. But I just got too much confirmation of what I suspected all along – that the clinical world is not ultimately not for me.
To get into the reasons why I quit, I’m going to start the story 23 years ago, when I was 18 and working at the front desk in a psychiatry office. At that time, I already had skepticism about the counseling profession, and it was largely confirmed by my summer working there. Two things primarily confirmed my worst fears about the profession.
For one thing, I saw how the pharmaceutical reps would come in constantly with big free lunches and other bribes to essentially get the time and attention of the psychiatrists. Couple that with the fact that most psychiatric clients would come in for 50 minutes of an initial consultation and walk out with a prescription, only to be seen every 6 months or so for a 20 minute “med check.” That was pretty horrifying to me.
Now I understand that probably most of those patients were probably also under the weekly care of a therapist, but it still felt so wrong to me. The fact that someone could be given brain altering chemicals without the prescribing doctor getting to know probably much of anything about them outside of their presenting symptoms frankly disturbed me. I didn’t and still don’t see that it helps anyone long-term to stick them on a drug and call that a permanent solution.
Don’t get me wrong, I know pharmaceutical psychiatric drugs can be extremely helpful in many cases, and even life-saving in some. But there are also many instances where the use of these drugs has gone horribly wrong. I’m just going to quote an article I found on this called, “Medication-Induced Suicides are Adverse Drug Events, Not Deaths of Despair.”:
National Adverse Drug Event Awareness Day, recognized annually on March 24th, serves as a critical reminder that Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) are the fourth leading cause of death in the US. The American Society of Pharmacoviligence (ASP), states the tragic reality is that the number of avoidable deaths related to ADEs is likely higher than reported because many deaths precipitated by ADEs are never recorded. ASP is launching a social media campaign encouraging real people to spotlight this public health epidemic by sharing their ADE experiences using the hashtag #FourthCause and sharing the FourthCause.org website.
(And, actually, when I went to the FourthCause website, it said that ADE’s are now the third leading cause of death in the US. The original article continues –)
The Medication-Induced Suicide Prevention and Education Foundation in Memory of Stewart Dolin (MISSD) is a safe-patient nonprofit dedicated to increasing awareness that various prescription drugs, even when taken as directed or discontinued, can cause suicidal thoughts, self-harm, violence, and iatrogenic suicide.
Iatrogenic is a fancy term for “caused by allopathic medical intervention.”
All that to say, I still believe my intuition at 18 was spot on. Americans, in general, are way overprescribed, often to their detriment. Doctors and psychiatrists are professionally funded by pharmaceutical companies that earn multiple billions of dollars a year, with over $634 billion of earnings reported in 2024, and CEOs receiving $23 million dollars a year income on average.
I could also get into the corrupt nature of the entire founding of the pharmaceutical industry and how it was created by John D. Rockerfeller when he realized petroleum could be turned into medication, but I won’t take the time for that here. If you’re interested, here’s a video link.
I also found out while in grad school that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, that’s basically the bible for clinical mental health practitioners, was significantly written by professionals who are directly paid by pharmaceutical companies. According to an online journal for healthcare professionals: “nearly 60% of DSM-5-TR panel members received significant payments from the pharmaceutical industry, totalling over $14 million.”
So, over half of the authors are on the payroll of companies that have significant financial investment in promoting their products. Does no one else see a conflict of interest in that?
And there were other things I found out in grad school that shocked me, primarily around the clear harms that occur when healthcare is for profit. For example, people are often illegally held against their will in treatment facilities just so that their insurance can be charged up to thousands of dollars. This is a truly traumatizing event for most people this happens to. In one of my classes, an excellent professor had us watch this local news story about this happening in Texas. But it happens in every state, as far as I can tell.
In a press release on the website for the Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights in St. Louis, they said:
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has resolved, as a major focus of its national efforts in 2025, to raise awareness of the abusive and costly practice of detaining people against their will in psychiatric facilities, with the goal of ending the practice.
If you’re interested in a much more thorough critique of the mental health industry, the book Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill
by DJ Jaffe is probably a good read. It’s on my current to-read list.
I could beat this drum further, like what happens when we see people as potential diagnoses instead of unique individuals. One cautionary tale is the Rosenhan experiments that took place between 1969 and 1972. During that period, Prof. David Rosenhan, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, sent eight fake patients, people that were fully fine and functioning in their lives, to 12 different psychiatric hospitals without the staff of these facilities knowing that the experiment was happening. None of the fake patients had any reportable symptoms or any history of mental disorders when they went in.
Yet, in all 12 instances, these fake patients were diagnosed with mental disorders and kept in hospitalization. And these misdiagnoses were never discovered during the course of their stay. It goes to show that hammers always look for a nail. If the “tool” is drugs and hospitalization, the wielders of those tools will find a justification for them, even if none exists.
Now, again, I know hospitalization can be life-saving for some. A close friend of mine has a son with severe Schizoaffective Disorder and hospitalization has kept him off the streets and unable to harm others or himself when he was in acute psychosis. But she also thinks that the treatment he received in those facilities did more harm than good for his personal overall mental health.
I also just want to say that I do believe that most people working within these systems genuinely want to help people. They wouldn’t go into the field otherwise. But within a transactional, capitalist system where profits are prioritized over people, the results are often very poor – especially for those in marginalized groups like black, brown, and indigenous folks.
Which brings me to the second telling experience I had at the psychiatrist office when I was 18. Now, let me say, I know the actions I’m about to describe are highly unethical. I don’t excuse my actions other than to say I was a teenager at the time. But at some point, I found myself looking at the session notes from a friend of mine that I’d known since we were 12 years old.
I knew throughout the years that she’d had some pretty severe mental health issues, including suicidal ideation brought on by a pharmaceutical acne medication. But the thing that shocked me about these notes was how completely she had her therapist fooled. I could tell that she had put on a fake happy face with the therapist, and that the therapist had bought it – hook, line, and sinker. The notes said that my friend was happy, well-adjusted, not exhibiting any major struggles.
Seeing the way my friend would drink to blackout on the weekends and act extremely erratically, I knew different. It struck me how easy it was for clients to give a false impression to therapists, and how going by clients’ simple self-report is a dubious premise for healing. Of course, most people seeking therapy would be more forth-coming than a teenager forced to be there by her parents, but you’d be surprised.
Over my years of seeing people as a healer and a group facilitator, I’ve noticed it’s quite common for people to avoid vulnerability and put on a happy face, or at least put on a face that seems reasonably well put together, even if their internal, emotional landscape is a downright dumpster fire. I mean, I was that person for the majority of my life. I had even myself fooled that I was doing much better than I really was until I had the pushback from the teachers at my healing school who were intuitive enough to see beneath my masks I didn’t even realize I was wearing.
Which brings me to one of the more personal reasons why I quit grad school.
When it comes down to it, I don’t think talk therapy goes deep enough. At least not to create the deep and lasting changes that would actually help people experience a significant difference in their mental and emotional health. Of course, there are modalities that go much deeper. Things like psychedelic therapy, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Internal Family Systems seem to get much better results than most talk therapy does by itself. But those trainings are optional after grad school. And many practitioners can’t afford them.
I’m extraordinarily lucky that I’m currently receiving what I genuinely believe to be one of the very best educations a healer can receive. In wildernessFusion, a mystery school here in the southern Appalachians where I’ve been a student for almost 7 years, the depth and breadth of transformation it has provided me, my classmates, and the clients we work with is really unparalleled in my experience.
So when I felt that I was wasting a significant amount of time and money on an academic training that was giving me little to no valuable practical skills to speak of, I lost steam. I was also upset to realize that, as a part of earning my degree, I was expected to give up to 30 hours a week of unpaid labor for 9 months throughout my practicum and internship. That, on top of still taking classes, and needing to earn an income as a single mom, and I realized that would be functionally impossible for me. When I brought this up with my awesome talk therapist, she confirmed that most people who do that are supported by a partner financially.
To me, this is another instance of exploiting feminized care-oriented labor, and I want no part in it. I think medical students are exploited in their residencies, and I think mental health counselors are similarly exploited through this unpaid internship system.
Plus, at the end of the day, I realized that getting licensed actually wasn’t going to make my life any easier. The whole reason I started the program was to be able to take insurance, join a private practice, and have other people do the marketing and billing for me. As an entrepreneur, I was getting real tired of the business side of things, and having someone else take care of it sounded great to me. But after talking to enough therapists who don’t even take insurance anymore because of the bureaucratic headache and the enslavement to the diagnosis model, I realized that wasn’t actually going to give me the relief I was seeking. The stress would just be coming from a different angle, but with the further frustration of being tied to a system I fundamentally disagree with.
So, I’m back to offering my healing services as a solopreneur. But I’m feeling very differently about it this time. Instead of feeling victimized by needing to think of things like marketing and sales and contracts, I’m celebrating that I get to do those things on my own terms, with my own morals and values intact.
I guess I’ve just always been the type of person that has to throw themselves into something fully for a while to see if it’s right for me or not. In some cases, that really works out, like the way I threw myself into wildernessFusion right after an intro talk 7 years ago. And sometimes, the gifts are that I get to be even more clear on what’s not for me, like in the case of grad school. Which is why I don’t regret it, even with the stupid amount of financial debt.
I just feel more enthusiastic and inspired than ever to share “alternative” – and I would say largely ancient – ways of healing that are more relevant now than ever. So thanks as always for being here, and if you have any feedback or questions, you can leave a comment here, or email me at rootedsourcepodcast@gmail.com
And if you’re interested in booking a session with me, they are either hands on in person here in Asheville, NC, or also equally effective online. You can find more info on my website, which is just my name: www.ionsulferrin.com
Be well until the next time friends,
and may your own journey unfold with clarity and grace!
