Counsellor, psychologist, psychotherapist...

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...support worker, psychiatric nurse...

I really want to change career but it seems like there's loads of different options for working in mental health.

How do I pick which would suit me best?

I suppose it depends how long you’d like study in your career
Obviously the psychologist psychotherapist is going to be more involved

If you can do it, go for the higher grade

Oh and bloody well done for going into mh
There’s never enough of people like you wanting to help

I've got the same issue.. want to go into something along the counselling/therapy/psychologist lines, but finding it far from straightforward working out the differences and routes to qualification for each (not looking into being a MH nurse, though that's an amazing thing to do). As far as I can work out they all do the same basic idea (talking), but deal with more serious issues as you go up the scale. Counselling is the quickest to qualify, about a year, and is usually private practice/voluntary. Often sees patients quite short term. Therapy or psychology can be private practice or hospital type setting, and will tend to see people longer term. Therapy seems to take a couple years to qualify and post graduate msc, psychology you seem to have to get a doctorate so that's a long time. So far I haven't worked out the advantage of being a psychologist over a therapist, and it seems a lot of extra study, so think being a therapist seems likely to wind up being the happy medium for me! I may be completely wrong on any of that, so happy to be corrected, but that's my understanding based on my googling so far!

I would suggest looking for a role as a support worker in a mental health service. You’ll get a really good idea of who does what and see where your interest lies.

There are far more trained counsellors than there are paid counselling roles - a lot of people spend thousands training and are then gutted to learn that they essentially have to volunteer for years with very limited opportunities for (usually poorly) paid, part-time employment. Psychology is also extremely competitive and you would need a psych degree and then loads of (often unpaid/poorly paid) honorary assistant posts before standing a chance at getting onto a doctorate. For the best chance of consistent paid work within a reasonable timeframe, I strongly suggest you look into mental health nursing, social work or occupational therapy (the latter is probably the least stressful!) All very interesting, varied roles with plenty of opportunities for further development, including paid NHS schemes to train in specific therapies, if talking therapy is where your main interests lie. Social work has paid grad schemes you can train on if you have a 2:1 or above at undergrad level. Check out Think Ahead, which is the specific mental health training programme. Good luck!

I’m a psychotherapist, 5 years training, lots of voluntary work whilst training, been working for myself in independent practice for 7 years now and pretty much always had a full practice. CPCAB offer a 6 week level 1 intro course which can help to identify which route you may want to go down and if counselling and psychotherapy is for you. I work with individuals and couples which helps in terms of broadening the client base. Good luck, it’s a tough role but a very rewarding one and no two days are the same