Mental Health Degrees Are “No Longer Professional”?
The Lie We Were Taught About Exhaustion
And This Is Why We’re Unbothered.
Funny enough…
I’ve always known jobs aren’t real.
And I’ve been saying that publicly for two years now.
What started as a funny conversation with my mom on a plane ride to “work” turned into what I now call my Jobs Are Bullshit Theory.
At the time, it sounded rebellious.
Now? It sounds prophetic.
Because when a system can look at mental health degrees and say they’re “no longer professional,” what it’s really saying is:
The labor that keeps people alive, regulated, and psychologically intact is optional.
And that’s exactly how capitalism has always treated care.
So yes—we’re unbothered.
Not because this isn’t dangerous.
But because some of us have already clocked the scam.
This Is Bigger Than Degrees—This Is About Who Gets to Be Seen as “Professional”
Let’s be honest about the subtext.
Fields rooted in:
Care
Emotion
Relationship
Trauma
Community
Regulation
Attachment
Have always been:
Feminized.
Racialized.
Undervalued.
So when these degrees get labeled “non-professional,” that’s not neutral.
That’s ideological.
It quietly says:
Care is not real work
Emotional labor is not real labor
Healing is not a real profession
And the people who do this work don’t deserve real protection
This is the same logic that built modern work culture in the first place—work rooted in white supremacy, extraction, and disposability.
And now we’re watching that logic decide, once again, who is worthy of legitimacy.
This Is What Happens When Care Is Treated Like a Hobby
When mental health degrees are devalued, the ripple effect is brutal:
Fewer people can afford training
Fewer people enter the field
Fewer Black therapists exist
Fewer culturally responsive providers are available
Longer waitlists
Higher costs
More untreated trauma
More burnout among providers
More suffering in communities
You don’t get to run “mental health matters” campaigns while dismantling the very pipeline that trains healers.
You don’t get to celebrate healing while starving the healers.
You Can’t Separate This From What’s Happening to Black Women at Work
In the same year that 300,000 Black women lost their jobs, we’re also watching the professional legitimacy of care fields erode.
That is not coincidence.
That is a system that:
Extracts
Discards
Then undermines the tools we’d need to recover
Black women are expected to:
Survive economic instability
Carry families
Regulate workplaces
Lead through chaos
Absorb community trauma
And now the very profession designed to support that psychological weight is being publicly questioned.
That’s not policy.
That’s violence with paperwork.
This is personal for me because I am:
A therapist
An educator
A supervisor
A business owner
And a Black woman
But it’s also strategic because over the next four years, my work is centered on one core mission:
Helping Black women rethink their relationship with work, productivity, and worth.
Because I don’t believe the solution is helping Black women “do better” inside a system that was never built for their safety.
I believe the solution is:
Unlearning work as identity
Detaching worth from productivity
Reclaiming rest as a clinical intervention
Building exit strategies—not just coping strategies
This is why I created my coaching, therapy intensives, and recovery-based work.
And this is exactly what I talk about in my newsletter, The Strong Black Woman Recovery Project
If you’re ready to stop building your life around a system that isn’t loyal to you—I’m talking to you.
Final Word: We Are Watching Trauma Be Manufactured in Real Time
When Black women are being laid off at record rates
AND the field designed to treat trauma is being delegitimized…
We are not just watching policy change.
We are watching:
Trauma be manufactured
Healing be defunded
And care be downgraded in real time
And I will keep naming that contradiction out loud.
