Years ago, I was in a Clinical Counseling master’s program, and I reached the point in the training where I began my internship, which means I had begun to work with clients. We clinical counselors-in-training were mostly seeing people with less intense forms of mental illness and unease, typically folks who were experiencing relatively mild depression and anxiety.
It quickly became clear that many (not all; but certainly many) of the clients I was working with were experiencing stress resulting from financial problems. That stress would then manifest as depression or anxiety or both. So for many of these folks, the root issue was financial insecurity and instability.
Talking to me, or to one of my colleagues, might have been somewhat helpful, and I like to think that we offered tools that mitigated clients’ anxiety, but the origin of their problems was outside of our locus of control. These people needed to earn more money, or have fewer demands on their limited financial resources, in order to really be able to breathe easier and perhaps wrest free from their anxiety and depression.
I spoke about this at length with one of the other women in the program who was making a similar set of observations in her own work. We agreed that this was probably very widespread, and we should talk to our professors about including information and techniques in our training that were designed to address these issues.
We brought our observations to the chair of the department and to another full-time faculty member. They had no intention of making any changes to the curriculum based on a couple of students’ suggestions.
Probably that’s to be expected. Certificate programs have topics and information that they are mandated to cover, and I suspect that making changes to the curriculum may be both cumbersome and time-consuming.
So we spent a fair amount of time in our program on pediatric bipolar disorder and body dysmorphia—very important topics, but conditions that affect relatively few people. But we never had any guidance on how to help people navigate their way to financial health as a stepping stone on the journey to mental health.
Have you seen the news item reporting that 40% of U.S. households couldn’t pay for an unexpected $400 expense? A Bloomberg Opinion piece challenges that percentage, putting it at 12% to 14%, while an online Barron’s article lands it pretty squarely at 38%. The fine shaving of hairs here doesn’t really matter; we’re talking about a lot of people who live on the edge financially. I don’t really buy the Bloomberg scenario; it seems improvisational and selective, which are essentially its criticisms of the original reporting. Still: Even the Bloomberg accounting means more than 45 million people are being kept up at night by financial worries and woes.
How could that not translate into stress and its handmaidens, anxiety and depression? Until we start to take citizens’ financial health seriously—maybe with a guaranteed minimum income as outlined by Martin Luther King, Jr. or Andrew Yang; or rainy-day funds bankrolled with work-based plans; or something-else-let’s-put-our-thinking-caps-on—our collective mental health will suffer.