A Degree in Psychology Opens the Door to Many Careers

Most of the recent talk about hiring has centered on medical services, where openings keep multiplying and plenty of people are lining up to fill them. Other fields matter too, though, even when they sit at some distance from medicine. Psychology is one that rarely makes headlines. For anyone drawn to how the mind works, a psychology degree can lead to work that pays well and feels worthwhile.

Here is an appeal to university and college students, and to high school seniors deciding what comes next: think seriously about studying psychology and counseling, and about a career in mental health. Demand for people holding these degrees keeps climbing. Shifts in the economy and in political life, at the local, national, and global level, have pushed a large share of the population into a kind of existential crisis. That crisis endangers the people living through it and the wider community, over both the short run and the long run. Training qualified mental health workers is something that has to start now, not later.

A psychology or counseling degree prepares a graduate for both social work and clinical work. Anyone heading into mental health should lean into the coursework that teaches them how to counsel and treat the growing number of people who have been cut off, uprooted, and stripped of the middle class security they once took for granted, then dropped into the fear of homelessness and poverty. Our institutions are shaky right now. The economy and the government are faltering. With joblessness and climbing prices, families that were mentally healthy not long ago are sliding into poverty and, with it, the beginnings of mental illness. People with these degrees are needed to help, to comfort, and to heal the minds and households wrecked by sudden upheaval.

Students who want to meet this crisis head on might concentrate on childhood development and child counseling, because the need there is urgent at the moment. Children and adolescents need help immediately. Troubled kids and teenagers are living through terrifying changes, forced out of the only home they have known and into cold, often filthy shelters or exposed homeless camps. Many of them are badly disoriented. That leaves them open to drug and alcohol abuse, to acting out, to disorders that pull them away from normal life. Domestic violence rises as husbands and wives quarrel over money they do not have and take their anger at a hostile world out on each other. Kids start to distrust their parents. They pull inward and begin to read the world as an enemy. Their sense of themselves gets battered by taunts and cruel comments from other children whose families have not yet collapsed. Without a trained counselor or psychologist to guide them back toward hope, these children risk lasting psychological harm, or getting lost altogether in a harsh new reality.

The degree also equips you to help and treat the men and women, thousands of adults, who slip into poverty and dispossession every single day. The fall into poverty can be lethal, and you can see it in the climbing number of suicides among parents who have lost work. That has to be confronted quickly. Suicide is the sharpest danger facing people who watched their homes and careers vanish almost overnight. Crime and destructive behavior tend to rise among them too. Thousands of fathers lie awake in shelter beds, ashamed, hopeless, and furious that their society never gave them the chance to work and provide for their families. One way out is despair, and sometimes suicide. Another is to swallow the humiliation and carry on as best they can. For some, robbery, burglary, and dealing drugs look like answers. The disorders stay: neurosis, emotional and cognitive trouble, even schizophrenia. People thrown abruptly into poverty are especially vulnerable to all of it.

If you are a student still weighing a major and a career, give psychology or counseling real thought. Given where the economy is headed, this knowledge is likely to stay in demand for a long while. The work can be deeply rewarding as well, since you spend your days helping people rebuild their lives and recover their self-respect.