PMHNP & LCPC Advice Needed

[sdeymonaz]

Hello Everyone,

I am getting ready to graduate with a B.A. in Psychology / Social & Criminal Justice (Dual Major). After graduating I want to pursue a 16 month ABSN with the ultimate goal of becoming a FNP/PMHNP. I am interested in working in private practice/therapy and want both the Prescribing and Psychotherapy capabilities and am wondering if I should also peruse LCPC Licensure. My thoughts on this is that the LCPC will give me a stronger focus and training on therapy which I am not sure the PMHNP would give me. I want to strengthen my NP degree making myself more marketable.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

[Nimrodel, BSN, RN]

Some PMHNP programs include a fair amount of therapy training. There's not really a practical reason to pursue LCPC - it's years of additional schooling without much payout. With PMHNP, you can do both therapy and med management. If your passion is truly therapy, then you should pursue that instead of nursing. If not, then there's no reason to do both.

[Oldmahubbard]

No one will care about your LCPC. You won't be able to bill differently, or more than a PMHNP.

Depending on the program, it probably will not even give you much of anything in real concrete, clinical skills.

There are currently more than 500 different types of psychotherapy, the last I knew.

If you are going to do the PMHNP, my suggestion is to start familiarizing yourself extensively with different psychotherapy approaches. No school can possibly do this for you.

If you are lucky, one or more schools of psycho-therapeutic thought will eventually start to resonate with you. It will call your name, so to speak. It will be consistent with your own life philosophy and experiences.

Time to dig in deeper with the literature and self-study material. Even the self help books designed for patients.

In my case, I found Solution Oriented Therapy and ACT to be most helpful, because they are behavior focused.

Doing an extensive, independent study of a small handful of different types of therapies will be much more meaningful than what you would get in any college program.

Which would be a superficial look at a whole bunch of meaningless crap.

My opinion only.

Anyway, most people are not interested in therapy, they only want to vent and complain.

A topic for another post.

[hrnurse]

This. Consider how it will be billed .

[MsMort]

Do the PMHNP program only and start looking into some CBT training. It's what EBT indicates as the most helpful for so many disorders.

[Rose2017]

I have a master's degree in counseling and have been an LPC for 11 years. I'm entering an accelerated PMHNP program this fall. Your NP program will not teach you how to do therapy well but your scope of practice will include counseling. Seek out additional therapy training, and I mean in depth, workshops if you really want to do counseling. Go get trained in experiential therapy if you want to do group work, in EMDR if you want to do trauma work, in CBT , MI & SFBT if you want to triage symptoms during a medication management session and play therapy if you plan to work with children. Realistically, though, people will be coming to see you in your role as an NP for medications.

[Rose2017]

And to clarify, 'seeking LPC licensure' requires that you have a Masters degree in counseling, accrue around somewhere around 3000 hours of post masters counseling experience and practice during that time under the supervision of another LPC. Plus whatever licensing exams your state requires.