Bureaucratic Bullying 2: Unemployment

By Susan O'Doherty. In 2006, I was working at a job I thought I would keep until I retired. I loved what I did. I was the assistant director of a psychotherapy center that helped crime victims, and I was responsible for supervising a staff of gifted and dedicated therapists and for introducing traumatized clients to the process of therapy. It was stressful but highly rewarding work, until the social service agency that oversaw our center decided that there was more money to be made out of us, and brought in a consultant to do an efficiency analysis. The result was that the center's executive director, the clinical director and I were all let go, and the therapists, who had been on salary, were changed to fee-for-service, which meant that they got paid only if the client showed up. Read more...