Pros
Good pay and benefits. Caring coworkers. Good training. If you want experience honing crisis skills, this is the place.
Cons
This is an under served, high needs population that have experienced sometimes generations of poverty and trauma. Many clients are chronically mentally ill. They can be highly reactive. It can be a scary place to work and many times, I had to ask for another staff member to sit with me during sessions as I was concerned for my safety. The Clinical management are uneducated about the emotional needs of staff in such an environment and seem to support the business management's scheduling and practices that encourage exhaustion, burn out, compassion fatigue and the symptoms of vicarious trauma. (Quantity is stressed over quality, although a lot of lip service is paid to quality care of clients.) It is important for staff to feel safe in expressing to their clinical manger what they are going through in order to experience resilience under such circumstances. Unfortunately, when one takes the risk to do that, management will minimize concerns or worse, behave with indifference or hostility. They are most likely burned out themselves. There was quite a bit of turnover in the clinical staff and by the time I left (after two years) all the therapists that were working at my location when I was hired were gone. I talked with many of them and they indicated it was not the pay or the benefits that they were unsatisfied with, it was the lack of support from management.