Hey deserving listeners, let's answer patron emails, this first email is from anonymous patron, he writes,

on a recent episode of the podcast you talked about the problem of therapists treating problems that they are not qualified to treat.

I am a student therapist currently

completing my internship and I couldn't agree more. However, during my internship I am

providing free therapy to all my clients and as a result I have many clients who can barely

pay rent each month let alone a therapist. The government here provides some

free therapy to those in need but the waiting list are very long. Even for someone who had just experienced a major crisis,

the wait list can be over five months. For these individual student therapists like me are often the only

place they have to turn.

I don't feel it would be ethical for me to turn clients away due to not having the training

to properly handle little issues because they have no one else that they can

turn to. I'm frank and honest with them about my student status and my lack of experience with

their issues and I tell them that at the very least I can listen and try to accompany them on their difficult journey.

I have a good supervisor who is helping me with all this but I was hoping to hear some encouragement or words of wisdom about the situation.

Do you think it's okay for me to offer therapy to clients with serious issues that I don't

have training for, end of email?

Yeah, so bottom line, we definitely want to only treat clients that we are competent to work with.

And there's a big problem in my field of therapists not knowing what they're competent in or

not knowing what clients they need to assess that might have issues that aren't

within their competency range, this kind of thing.

At the same time, you bring up a good point that if someone comes to you that you have and that client has issues

that you're not competent with but there's no one else that they can talk to then maybe it's better that they have at least you to talk to

...