Eating Recovery Center | Pathlight Mood & Anxiety Center reviews

Though I already had three years of direct clinical experience, when I was hired I was assured that the majority of ERC/Pathlight employees come in at the Program Therapist level, that it was a “stepping stone” to the Primary Therapist position that most likely awaited me in a few months. Instead of promoting from within, the company repeatedly hired outside therapists directly to the Primary Therapist role. They also denied a promotion to a loyal employee who had 4+ years of experience working for them. They only began to promote Program Therapists once they lost so many employees that they had little choice, and those new Primary Therapists did not have as much support as they would have liked to be successful in the role. Supervision was haphazard and inconsistent during the entirety of 2020, and staff were offered the opportunity to seek outside supervision, to be reimbursed up to $2k a year; however, they were informed much later that they had to work for at least 18 months to be eligible for reimbursement - so no one who quit before that time was reimbursed for any supervision. Part of the deal - in my mind - for working with higher risk clients for much lower pay than private or even group practice, is that you get built-in supervision, etc. Pathlight does not invest in the professional growth of their staff. During a deadly global pandemic, an event unprecedented in most of our lifetimes, ERC/Pathlight leadership has repeatedly said, “Trust us,” while privileging the pursuit of wealth and the maintenance of the status quo over the wellbeing of its employees, and by extension, its patients. This is evidenced by leadership downplaying the danger and impact of COVID-19, even as we surpassed 390,000 deaths nationally and more than 2 million deaths globally; emphasizing COVID procedures that don’t make sense, such as advising staff and patients to stay six feet apart from one another in a crowded single-suite site with minimal airflow, and behaving as though saying that we follow effective safety procedure is the same as it being so; requiring staff to stay onsite despite patients testing positive and coming to program while symptomatic; maintaining high patient census, while refusing to increase staff support; repeatedly minimizing staff concerns and rejecting staff proposals and requests for change out of hand; refusing to move the majority of services to virtual care, despite other essential healthcare services shifting to telehealth, and without regard to the research which indicates that it has comparable therapeutic outcomes to in-person care; and recommending that staff practice “better self-care” rather than making organizational changes that could alleviate the stress and suffering we carry. Two of ERC/Pathlight’s mission values with which I resonate most are compassion and integrity, yet these values were not demonstrated in the agency’s “business as usual” approach throughout 2020. Leadership does not value its staff and treats Program Therapists in particular as though they were disposable labor, rather than highly educated and competent professionals. I watched at least fifteen coworkers come and go in 2020 (and they lost many more in the first quarter of 2021), and these losses were almost entirely due to the treatment they received while they were here. They were forced to resign because ERC/Pathlight was not doing enough to protect them and their families during COVID; they left because the burden of working so hard with so little support, feedback, or validation became too much; ERC/Pathlight would not pay them fairly based on their experience, their license, or the COVID-related hazards they were forced to tolerate to work here; they had to work for months at reduced staffing and were completely burned out; they could not reconcile their values of social and racial justice with a company that is not authentically committed to equity and anti-racism, but only invests in virtue signaling; in their efforts to advocate for their staff, they threatened the status quo and intimidated those made comfortable by it; or because they put in the work as a BHC/Program Therapist for the promise of getting to work individually with clients as a Primary Therapist one day, and ERC/Pathlight dangled that carrot in front of them for years, only to deny it to them when they had finally gotten their associate’s license. This agency has invested in upper leadership that lacks compassion for and condescends to its employees. Last spring, the CEO had the gall to ask us not to “burden” our coworkers by calling out sick -- during a pandemic. My site was referred to as “the problem child” for failing to join the (deeply flawed) "pod system" while at 60% staffing. Upper management said that staff who quit at the beginning of COVID just “didn’t know what they signed up for” when they were hired; and that staff were “being extra” when they refused to come to work after onsite patients tested positive for COVID-19. Instead of welcoming constructive feedback and possible solutions for problems identified by staff, leadership accused staff of “trying to tell us what to do,” and staff were individually interrogated and bullied by Human Resources after submitting a letter of requests. I was personally told that if I didn’t like the way things were run, I was welcome to resign. It strikes me as, at the very least, incredibly arrogant to repeatedly ignore the perspectives of staff who perform the majority of this company’s direct service and thus are best positioned to notice flaws in the system. We were frequently reminded that leadership were “only human," as they refused to take action or accountability for their errors.

Where to start?? This is a system that perpetuates the trauma which creates the people they depend on as employees. They exploit and gaslight staff who are “people-pleasers” and who want to be team players - and who often are reenacting relational trauma of their own in trying hard to be “good” - and then expect those same staff to teach patients how to set and uphold boundaries in service of recovery and self-protection. Employees who are confident and appropriately assertive (which are rare, because those people usually leave) seem to generally be viewed as inconvenient and problematic. -------- EVERYONE I have known who has left, in multiple roles, has said that it has taken at least a year to feel any sort of recovery from this job. The phrase “survivors club” has literally been used by multiple people. --------- This is a narcissistic system that believes the people at the top are always right, that people who disagree are wrong, and that if staff who are involved in direct patient care are struggling - even if ALL of them are struggling - then it must be their fault and if they worked harder, did better, took things less personally, they would be able to “handle” things better. (It also results in a cult-like feeling for the people in the system, who are told that they treat the “sickest of the sick” patients and it is implied that the people who leave can’t “hack it.” There is a LOT of self-aggrandizement that happens.) ------------ I have lots of very personal and traumatic examples I could share. Some less personal examples of this company’s attitudes: 1.) After there was a string of longtime employees who left for outpatient work, the company newsletter published a list of “10 reasons it’s better to work for ERC than to be in private practice.” This was the laughingstock of current and former employees. 2.) Employees were encouraged, in staff meetings, to submit positive reviews on Glassdoor to counter the wealth of reviews like this one. 3.) No former employee I know has been offered an exit interview, (which I thought was legally required?). ------ I write this here now in hopes that potential employees can be warned, particularly if their personal experiences have included a tendency to ignore their own needs and feelings in order to “keep the peace” or “be a team player.” As others have said, don’t write off the bad reviews as just being from disgruntled employees. The harm this place caused me has taken a lot of time and money to even START healing from.