Please help

[Jamiediane]

Alright so I'm at my wits end going back and forth with this. I love psychology it's my all time favorite subject! So naturally I said oh I wanna be a psychologist which was fine until I realized how much schooling you must complete so I looked into lcsw and masters of psych programs. You don't have many job opportunities with a masters in psych and the income for lcsw is very very low. I have two children I get no help from their dad and I have no family so me going to school for 6 more years after my undergrad living off a stipend is not realistic and healthy for my children. Going to school for my undergrad and then 3 more years in a masters program just to have a very low salary is also not going to work. Someone pointed me in the direction of psychiatric nurse practitioner since I emphasized I like psych so much but my only problem with it and this is going to sound high school is that I won't have a lot of knowledge and I don't want doctors to criticize me because I don't know something. So if any NPs can comment on that I would love it!

[elkpark]

Don't a PsyD and NP have about the same years of education?

A PsyD typically takes between four and six years to complete. There are probably people who spent that long getting an MSN (I know one CNS who went "very part-time" and took seven years to finish her MSN), but, as you know, that would be the exception, not the rule. Are there even any "from scratch" (not simply "topping up" an MSN) dnp programs that would take more than four years?

[Jules A, MSN]

Are there even any "from scratch" (not simply "topping up" an MSN) DNP programs that would take more than four years?

Dear God I would hope it takes longer than 4 years fulltime to get a doctorate in anything from scratch. I would have thought doctorate:doctorate would be similar amounts of time.

[elkpark]

Dear God I would hope it takes longer than 4 years fulltime to get a doctorate in anything from scratch. I would have thought doctorate:doctorate would be similar amounts of time.

As far as I'm aware (someone please correct me if I'm wrong, I hate being wrong :)), most "from scratch" dnp programs (starting from undergrad degree, not an existing MSN) are set up to be three to four years of full-time study. Of course, if you go part-time, it can take a lot longer, but that's no longer comparing "apples to apples." Once again, nursing is selling ourselves short, and setting ourselves up to compare unfavorably to other academic and clinical disciplines (and this is why other disciplines don't take us v. seriously).

And, of course, there's no requirement to get a DNP in order to become a psych NP; plenty of people are doing it in two years ("full-time" study which you can do while simultaneously working full-time, which raises the question of how rigorous and demanding the "full-time" study is). Shoot, Vandy still has their one-calendar-year MSN program, and I imagine that's not the only one in the country (just the only one I know of personally).