Originally published: . Volume 9, No. 5. Source pages: 6.
Lawmakers in Texas appear poised to consolidate all mental health boards into one, including the state psychology board. The Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists (TSBEP) will be going through Sunset in 2019 because the board’s sunset legislation failed to pass in the last session of the Texas Legislature.
Currently the Texas Sunset Commission recommended that TSBEP be consolidated with the other mental health boards to create an umbrella mental health agency including Social Workers, Licensed Counselors, and Marriage & Family Therapists.
The Texas Psychological Association (TPA) members submitted reports and comments asking policy-makers to maintain the TSBEP as an independent entity, maintain standards of training, internship, post doctoral requirements, and other requirements which had been deemed by the Sunset Commission to be “bottlenecks” to the profession and “antiquated licensing requirements,” according to TPA sources.
However, despite testimony from TPA and individual psychologists, sources say the Sunset Commission staff completed their review of the TSBEP and will recommend that the legislature to combine all the mental health boards into a single agency.
Dr. James Thompson, licensed in both Texas and Louisiana told the Times, “Louisiana psychologists need to know what is happening in Texas. It is too late to help Texas, but it might help Louisiana.”
Thompson believes that a “superboard” will severely limit the influence and decision-making of doctoral level psychologists, because masters providers will greatly outnumber psychologists. “I think all is lost in Texas until there is a political change in Austin,” he said.
“The deregulators are triumphant in all respects. They have decimated all public and social services. Public schools are a joke now. They mainstream the sickest children into regular classrooms, making it impossible for teachers, regular students and special education students.”
“Texas Medicaid is a shambles,” he said. “Reimbursement is less and less. One of the managed care plans has a Behavior Analyst reviewing the requests for psychological testing, so guess what, she does not approve any requests for testing.”
This new challenge is just one in a line of issues that the community in Texas has had to deal with over the last few years, including the state association suing the board, and a Free Speech lawsuit.
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