Psychotherapy Finances Blog

After the story on anger management as a niche market in the June issue of Psyfin, a new study on road rage caught our attention. It says researchers have found that drivers who put bumper stickers on their car are more likely to express rage by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behaviors than those who have nothing posted on their vehicle.

A vanity plate is another sign that the driver may be aggressive, says psychologist William Szlemko, a Colorado State University researcher writing in the June issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Interestingly, it doesn’t matter what the bumper sticker says. A driver with a sticker that says “Visualize world peace” is just as likely to be aggressive as a person who chose, “Don’t mess with Texas,” or “My kid beat up your honor student.”

The reason: Drivers who personalize their vehicle tend to view it as their personal space, rather than public space, and are therefore more territorial. “The more markers a car has, the more aggressively the person tends to drive when provoked,” Szlemko told the Washington Post on June 17. You can find a link to the study at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/jasp/38/6.

If you’ve got some time in your schedule and would like to become involved in a worthy cause, the Department of Veterans Affairs needs help to provide counseling for more than 300,000 military personnel and their families.

About 20,000 mental health professionals provide services for the Pentagon and VA, but they can’t keep up with the flow of soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan who are suffering from severe anxiety and PTSD. At the same time, their families are struggling with their own mental health problems after long separations from their loved ones.

Volunteer therapists are now stepping in to fill the void. They’re providing pro bono work, but some are also moving on to the become providers for TRICARE, the medical network which serves the military. For more information, check out:

http://www.giveanhour.org/skins/gah/home.aspx. A group of 1,200 therapists are donating an hour a week of free care. Volunteers commit for a year.

http://www.cominghomeproject.net/cominghome/. This is for therapists interested in providing services in the San Francisco area.

http://www.thesoldiersproject.org/index.cfm. About 200 have volunteered so far to offer services in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and New York.

We’ve recently spoken with clinicians who say that the drum beat of bad economic news is having an effect on their practice, with referrals down 20% in some cases. In the Detroit area, a psychologist tells us that his caseload has been cut in half. We’d like to hear from other practitioners about their experience. We suspect some regions are dong better than others.

Meanwhile, there’s news about the psychological impact of skyrocketing gas prices. For more on that, see http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/106436.php. The problem is apparently impacting people’s performance on the job, according to a survey of 800 employees in a wide range of occupations. Survey respondents drove an average of 15 miles to work each day. 

Not surprisingly, the report says, gas prices are the number one water cooler topic of our times.

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) has announced a new Web site (www.psysr.org) to promote the organization and its causes–one of which is to challenge the American Psychological Association (APA) stand on the prison torture issue.

PsySR is asking visitors to sign a petition to the APA seeking a policy that prohibits psychologists from participating in settings where people are held in violation of international law, the Geneva Convention or the U.S. Constitution.  The exception would be if the psychologist is working directly for the detainee or a human rights organization. The APA insists it already has a policy that opposes torture.

PsySR, based in Washington, DC, has other policy initiatives as well, which are explained in detail on the Web site. You don’t have to be a psychologist to join–it broadly encompasses mental health professionals of various stripes.

As we reported in our April issue, there was a clash of two California psychologist organizations over Senate Bill 1427, a prescription privilege bill sponsored by the National Alliance of Professional Psychology Providers (NAPPP). The California Psychological Association (CPA) had reservations about the proposal, which died in committee April 9 for lack of support. NAPPP quickly blamed the CPA for its failure.

Yesterday, CPA posted video of the hearing on its Web site (www.cpapsych.org) . The CPA’s basic message: Watch this video and judge for yourself. Hit the link and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to find another link to the video, which runs 37 minutes.  This proposal is likely to come up again, but probably not until next January.

Meanwhile, we’ll be taking a look at a prescription effort in Missouri, which is still active and has some key support.

We’ve spoken with a lot of clinicians over the years who swear by newspaper advertising as a way to bring in new clients. But recently, the use of print as an advertising medium has dropped off as therapists turn to online directories, Web sites and Google AdWords. We’ve been talking with some practitioners who still find print ads useful, however. We’re finding that two kinds of print ads work best.

 One, ads that are targeted toward a specific population seem to generate clients. Here, we’re talking about display ads in specialty publications–gay-lesbian newspapers, for example, if you happen to serve that niche.

Two, ads in small community newspapers may work. That’s partly because these types of publications are more thoroughly read by their targeted audiences. The ads themselves are also relatively inexpensive so you get a bigger bang for your buck. We’d be interested in hearing about other clinicians who have had experiences with newspaper advertising.

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