An $18,500 scholarship to help pay for graduate school. Student loan forgiveness. Free on-the-job training. All license fees paid. And the opportunity to serve the underserved ‘with dignity’.

“Do Worthwhile Work,” the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health’s new marketing campaign, highlights these benefits on its website in hopes that applicants will see the benefits of public sector mental health work and apply.

“Your work can change lives,” the campaign reads. “Leave today better than you found it, LA County DMH has a place for you.”

In many places, in fact: As of mid-September, the agency had a 28% vacancy rate, with 1,890 vacant positions and just over 4,800 employees, according to county data.

For decades, the department didn’t need marketing campaigns or too many perks to get people to apply. But in recent years, America’s largest county mental health department has seen a decline in applicants.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for mental health practitioners already exceeded supply. Many in California were retiring, and master’s programs and medical schools were not producing enough therapists, psychologists or psychiatrists to replace retirees or meet growing demand, according to recent research into the state’s behavioral health workforce.

If workforce trends continue, California is expected to experience a shortage of 5,000 mental health practitioners by 2026, according to research from consulting firm Mercer.

Demand has only grown as more Americans than ever, hit by the uncertainty and misery brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, are signing up for therapy. New therapists who would have done that traditionally

began

in the public sector are recruited by private companies offering bonuses, flexible working hours and remote work, and patients who, although still struggling, are not without a home or suffering from acute psychosis, aggravated by years of living outside.

Internally, the Department of Mental Health has still not recovered from the 18-month nationwide hiring freeze, which was implemented by the Board of Supervisors at the start of the pandemic to save money in the midst of disaster. As a result, many important administrative positions remained unfilled. And it can still take months to get hired by the province, due to civil service rules that dictate how the hiring is done.

Of the 103 people the department hired in August, it took an average of 227 days from the time the candidate submitted an application to the time he/she was hired.

The department’s vacancies have hampered progress in addressing LA County’s homelessness crisis as pressure mounts from an impatient public. A lack of workers has led to longer response times for teams responding to mental health crises called on the 988 hotline. It has postponed care in 2021; it took an average of 27 days to see a provincial psychiatrist at the clinic. It has also led to burnout among existing staff, who are working longer hours to compensate for the lack of new talent, an issue supervisors discussed at a recent meeting.

And it has made implementing changes from Sacramento a challenge. On Dec. 1 wants LA County Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Court. If they haven’t hired enough staff, they will pull people from existing programs until hiring is complete, according to department documents.

“There is no doubt that we have two crises: the immense mental health crisis in our communities and the challenge for our own Department of Mental Health to hire enough people to respond to it,” said Board of Trustees Chair Janice Hahn in a statement. “My vision is that we will have enough mental health professionals to not only work in camps with people suffering from mental illness on the streets, but also enough to respond immediately to mental health emergency calls, and hiring has held us back.”

These challenges have forced the Ministry of Mental Health to get creative.

It has started organizing employee fairs where applicants receive offers on the same day they go for a job interview. These events were mainly aimed at vacancies that were difficult to fill and showed results.

In the

P

Over the past five months, Hahn said, the mental health department has hired 272 people at grants, including 37 to join the homeless response teams and 30 who will respond to mental health emergency calls, with response times recently improving .

These recruitment events are like a speed dating session between employers and applicants. On a recent Thursday at the department’s headquarters in Koreatown, dozens of recently graduated social work master’s students filed into a conference room to hear elevator pitches from nearly two dozen mental health clinics.

Each hiring manager briefly explained the benefits of working at their location.

“We are one of the busiest clinics” in our service area in Willowbrook, a manager said. “What helps with our work is that we have purpose and meaning, and you can find it there,” said a manager at a clinic in Compton.

This was said by a supervisor at a clinic in San Pedro

it has

“one of the strongest housing programs.”

are

area. “We like to celebrate,” said a Long Beach clinic manager, describing the many potlucks and nacho dinners. “We try to support each other.”

The energy among the participants was jovial, a mix of nerves and polite laughter, until a social worker in the audience asked about the caseloads.

The supervisor of a Skid Row clinic shot straight ahead. If hired there, she said, they will have about 150 clients, including patients who come in twice a year for drug regimen checks.

n as well

customers in crisis who come in often.

“A lot of these other clinics have so many [on their caseloads] too,” she added, to polite laughter around the room.

Nicole Pyles sat nearby and reminded herself to start breathing again. Pyles, a recent graduate of the USC School of Social Work, had the Skid Row clinic as her No. 1 choice before the event begins.

“I thought

,

“Pssh, I got this, I don’t worry about it, I’ve had a caseload of like 30 people,” said Pyles, 47. “When she said 150 people, I think my heart jumped out of my mouth and lay somewhere to the ground.”

Pyles previously worked as a substance abuse counselor, which does not require a master’s degree to become certified and see clients.

But Pyles knew that for many of her clients, their addiction was much more complicated than brain chemicals that caused them to crave a substance. She wanted to get to the heart of the problem, namely the trauma that fueled her addiction. A master’s degree is required for such work.

However, Pyles was happy enough in her last job working with pregnant and postpartum clients struggling with substance use disorders.

Until a customer arrived who had been working diligently

of

asked the program for help for a few months. The client’s court date to retain custody of her newborn baby had been moved from Monterey Park to the Antelope Valley, and she needed a ride.

Pyles thought she could help with that. However, her supervisor told Pyles that she was “enabling” this woman and declined the request.

It was then that Pyles realized she wanted the power to help in a bigger and more meaningful way.

“A friend of mine said to me, ‘If you want to make those calls and be able to make the decisions, you need to get an education,’” Pyles said. ‘And that’s exactly what I did.

After completing her master’s degree at USC, she agreed to work at the downtown Skid Row clinic and commit to the county for a year after accepting an $18,500 scholarship. “My goal is to stay at DMH and advance into leadership,” she said.

These are the types of practitioners that Lisa H. Wong, director of the Department of Mental Health, says her department is starting to attract.

The department and its contract agencies took a hit early in the pandemic, as workers across the country reassessed the type of work they wanted.

Wong said that when she worked as a clinical supervisor at a Skid Row facility 15 years ago, she hosted recruitment events that brought in dozens of candidates who wanted to work there, even though “admittedly [it] It’s not for everyone.”

By comparison, about a year and a half ago, when she conducted a recruitment campaign for adult mental health positions across the country, she received only 13 applicants.

But in recent months, Wong says the department has noticed a new shift.

“I know I’ve been accused of being an optimist at times, but I think the tide is turning,” Wong said, noting that hiring and promotions have increased 200% this year. “What we’re seeing now is kind of a blessing in disguise from the national workforce shortage. We’re now getting the people who are the true believers, the urban missionaries.”

In addition to the workforce grants, the department is also renewing academic ties with graduate programs, which will lead to more internships there, and will begin recruiting at out-of-state conferences and campuses for the first time. The department began recruiting with the American Psychological Assn. conference in Washington, DC, where LGBTQ+ physicians told district staff they were eager to move to California because they did not feel safe in their home state. “But besides that, a lot of people said, ‘I’d really like to move to California, I’d love to live in LA, but I don’t think I can afford it,’” Wong said. Wong said they will focus much of their attention on recruiting at historically black colleges and universities, with current county employees, who are alumni, talking about working in the department. “We need more doctors who look like our community,” Wong said. “I would love for an African American little boy to be able to meet a black psychologist and know that not only can they open up and have some cultural understanding, but also that this is someone he can aspire to be too.”