Therapists in mental health need to become more visible.

they are knowledgeable in the treatment of this population; they are often limited to hiring graduates withOUl experience to fill their funding requirements. As an educator and a former academic educator, we recognize the difficulties of teaching a clinical profession in an academic setting. It is imperative that we require students wishing to treat a specific population to gain clinical experience in this area before they can be hired. It appears irresponsible to allow a student with one course in pediatrics and without awareness of the depth of ski II he or she is lacking to treat a child with disabilities. Parents would have no way of knowing that the therapist treating their children had no hands-on experience and only limited supervisory experience. If occupational therapy standards for areas like pediatrics decline, the quality of our profession will be directly affected as well as the opinion of other professionals toward us whose standards of educational requirements are higher. Lillian Kaplan, OTR Gita Porway, MA, OTR Brooklyn, New York