TW: mentions of suicide and self-harm.
Throwaway account, I'm not in the States so the legal frameworks and wage levels differ. I fudged the numbers a little to anonymize myself further. Let's say our minimum wage is around $10 and the city I live in has notoriously high cost of living.
This is part r/antiwork, part r/collegerant. I'm a psychology student and the training to become a psychologist in my country is very competitive and limited. My classes started with 1000 people, ended with 20 competing for 8 places or fewer. I didn't get in so now I work at a crisis helpline as a counsellor to “get some experience”.
I'm earning $11 per hour, 90% of the staff here are fellow psych rejects with masters and even PhDs. We are paid only marginally more than people working at the supermarket and yet we are expected to pick up the slack for our overburdened mental health system. We are the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff when people have been turned away from the crisis mental health team for not being “distressed enough”. The place I work at pretty much serves as primary mental healthcare for many people. I have dealt with people who are actively psychotic, in the process of suicide, actively self-harming on the end… all in one shift.
I love my job, but love doesn't pay the bills. Caring professions like ours are notoriously underpaid, and considering the intensity of the work we do our pay is a fucking pittance even compared to others in the field. We are here “for the experience”, and the possibility of this “experience” helping us get into psychology training is the carrot that keeps many of us around. To avoid burnouts my workplace offers only part-time hours which means many people hold multiple jobs to get by in an expensive city.
I'm grateful for my workplace's existence, but sometimes I feel like the entire system is just a fucking rort. The government underfunds the mental health system for years, shit hits the fan, and we end up carrying the mental health system while the government keeps hand-wringing on what to do to fix the system. Meanwhile, my country leads the OECD in suicide rates and mental health challenges, very capable people like my colleagues go through grad school just to wind up in a high-stress job that pays marginally better than the minimum wage. I am resentful at the fact that we're essentially in a slightly better version of those “get paid in experience” internship nightmares (hey, at least our after-tax pay just covers the market rent in this city, now we have a place to starve!) I know that my experience is not unique, nor is it the worst, but I'd rather not indulge in a race to the bottom.
All I know is, we are expected to be there for others, but what's fucking there for us?!