Who's Going to Take Care of Our Mental Health Workers?

We talk a lot about the mental health crisis in this country, especially rising rates of anxiety and depression. And we talk about therapist shortages and how hard it is to get an appointment. But there's a conversation we're not having loudly enough that affects the people actually serving us — and it sits right at the intersection of education, finance, and workforce sustainability:

What happens to mental health workers when the system stops treating their education as a professional investment?

Because if you haven’t heard, that's exactly what's happening.

No Longer Classified as “Professional”

When the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) was signed into law in 2025, it made waves for a lot of reasons, but buried in the details was something that didn't make as many headlines as it should have: a redefinition of what counts as a "professional degree" for federal student loan purposes.

The federal government's list of qualifying professional degrees now includes eleven specific fields: medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology, and clinical psychology. Notice what’s missing?

Mental health counseling, social work, marriage and family therapy, and school counseling are no longer professional degrees in the eyes of federal loans. That technicality has direct, tangible consequences for hundreds of thousands of people who chose a career dedicated to helping others.

The Consequences of Withheld Funding

The Council on Social Work Education estimates that 370,000 students could be directly affected by this reclassification, with more than $8 billion in federal loans no longer available to them annually. That's about 22% of all annual federal loan disbursements withheld for a group of professionals that society absolutely cannot function without.

Those with advanced psychology or clinical degrees can carry well over $200k in student debt. These are workers who, more often than not, enter the public sector — nonprofits, community health centers, school systems — where salaries are not making up the gap.

I've spent years in the student loan benefits space watching how debt shapes decisions like which jobs people take, which jobs they leave, and which careers they never start.

When you’re a 22-year-old looking at a master's program in counseling, it’s one simple calculation: How long will it take me to pay this back on what I'm likely to earn? If the answer is "never," the enrollment numbers are going to reflect that.

Fostering the Worker Shortage

Here's what strikes me most: we are in the middle of a recognized mental health crisis. Burnout among clinicians is at record levels. Waitlists for therapy can run months. Rural communities are chronically underserved. We simply don't have enough mental health workers.

And yet, the policy response to our mental health worker shortage has been to make it harder to finance the education required to enter those fields.

Social workers alone provide the majority of mental and behavioral health services in the United States. They support children, the elderly, veterans, and some of the most vulnerable populations we have. If we make it economically irrational to pursue this career, we should not be surprised when the pipeline dries up.

PSLF is an Unreliable Safety Net

For years, Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) has been the lifeline many mental health workers relied on. Work for a nonprofit or government employer for 10 years, make 120 qualifying payments, and have your remaining balance forgiven. For a school counselor or community health center therapist, that program made the career financially survivable.

However, proposed restrictions on which nonprofit employers qualify, ongoing legal challenges, and years of program instability have made PSLF an unreliable safety net. When I talk to mental health professionals navigating their loan repayment options, the word I hear most often is "uncertainty." That uncertainty makes it hard to prepare for the future and is its own deterrent to the field.

It’s Time for Employers to Step Up

So who’s going to take care of our mental health workers? That's the question I keep coming back to. We outsource our emotional labor — the grief, the trauma, the anxiety, the despair — to an entire class of professionals, and then we systematically underinvest in their financial wellbeing.

Employers have a real role to play here, and I don't think enough of them realize it.

Under Section 127 of the tax code, employers can contribute up to $5,250 per year tax-free toward an employee's student loans. That benefit applies just as much to a licensed clinical social worker at a hospital system as it does to a software engineer at a tech company. Mental health organizations, healthcare networks, school districts — any employer with a workforce carrying student loan debt — can make a meaningful difference in the lives of their clinical staff with a benefit that costs them nothing extra in payroll taxes.

I've seen what happens when organizations step up by providing student loan assistance. Retention improves. Recruitment gets easier. People stop taking the private-practice route purely for financial survival and choose to stay in the public-serving roles they trained for.

What You Can Do

At the policy level, the exclusion of mental health and social work degrees from "professional" classification is a mistake that needs to be revisited — and the advocacy community knows it. But policy moves slowly, and the students enrolling today don't have the luxury of waiting for the next rulemaking cycle.

In the meantime, I encourage three things:

1. For students entering the mental health field: Know your numbers before you borrow. Understand your loan limits, your repayment options, and whether your future employer will qualify for PSLF. Seek out employers who offer student loan repayment benefits as part of their compensation package — because those benefits exist and they can significantly change your financial picture.

2. For mental health employers and HR teams: If you’re not offering a student loan repayment benefit, you’re working at a disadvantage and may not even know it. This is not a luxury benefit anymore. For clinical staff in particular, it may be the deciding factor between whether someone joins your team, stays on your team, or burns out and leaves the field entirely.

3. For policymakers: The definition of "professional" should reflect the professional value of the work, not the political convenience of a short list. The people treating our collective mental health crisis deserve the same systemic support we extend to the people treating our physical health.

Let’s Be the Answer

We have a mental health crisis, and instead of encouraging workers to join the fight, we’re leaving the people who chose this path with fewer financial resources and fewer safety nets than they had before.

That is not a sustainable trajectory — not for those workers, not for the employers who rely on them, and not for the patients and communities that depend on them.

So who’s going to take care of our mental health workers? The answer is all of us, through the systems we build, the benefits we offer, and the policies we demand.