Pros
---Amazing, dedicated, hardworking teammates and colleagues. ---Exposure to a wide - WIDE! - range of behavioral and mental health presentations. ---Health benefit options, including for PT employees. ---Some useful education and training. ---If you’re there long enough, you can get “free” supervision for licensure.
Cons
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.