Mental health practitioners are medical professionals responsible for taking care of patients with mental disorders such as schizophrenia, split personality disorder, and depression. As a mental health practitioner, you have to create and administer care plans for patients who are mentally disabled and make sure your patients use their drugs appropriately by observing post medication administration with the nurses. Also, you are in charge of doing regular progress check-ups on your patient to know if there will be a need for additional treatment or change in treatment and organizing therapeutic activities to ensure that your patients learn functional living skills.
You should have communication skills, emotional skills, interpersonal skills, and you should be able to prepare a treatment plan, organize group therapy and conduct in-home treatment to succeed. Most mental health practitioners have a bachelor's degree in psychology, social work, or a related course. You will earn an average of $47,177 per year on the job.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a Mental Health Practitioner. For example, did you know that they make an average of $23.9 an hour? That's $49,715 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 11% and produce 81,200 job opportunities across the U.S.
There are certain skills that many Mental Health Practitioners have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed Communication skills, Emotional skills and Interpersonal skills.
If you're interested in becoming a Mental Health Practitioner, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 58.3% of Mental Health Practitioners have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 30.2% of Mental Health Practitioners have master's degrees. Even though most Mental Health Practitioners have a college degree, it's impossible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a Mental Health Practitioner. When we researched the most common majors for a Mental Health Practitioner, we found that they most commonly earn Bachelor's Degree degrees or Master's Degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on Mental Health Practitioner resumes include Associate Degree degrees or Doctoral Degree degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a Mental Health Practitioner. In fact, many Mental Health Practitioner jobs require experience in a role such as Internship. Meanwhile, many Mental Health Practitioners also have previous career experience in roles such as Social Work Internship or Case Manager.