Grapplicant

I think the biggest issue is that psychology is not a high demand field (in terms of job outlook which is 3% or average) whereas social work, mental health counseling and many adjacent fields related to mental health clinical work are in high demand.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the job outlook of adjacent fields at 8% for school counselors, 22% for marriage and family therapists, 13% for social workers and 25% for Substance Abuse, Behavioral Disorder, and Mental Health Counselors. All of these are well above average job outlooks. 
 
Schools are therefore focusing on fields that are in demand and desperately need practitioners whereas fields like clinical psych (which don’t have enough internship sites for many more PhD or PsyD students) are only growing slowly. 
 
The talent may be wasted but I think what the field of psychology needs to do a better job at is convincing applicants that they don’t need to get a PhD or PsyD to do what they want. There are so many other routes to be a mental health clinician and reducing our field to only a few options means that it will be so much more competitive and grueling. 

I've been thinking about this a lot. The funding for graduate study in clinical psychology is so often tied to funding for grants in individual laboratories. So long as that is the system, admit rates will be very low, in accordance with flow of grant money, and based on alignment of interests with grant needs. The APA needs to think long and hard about its requirement that licensing for clinical psychologists flow through these narrowly focused grant-based programs. For example, wouldn't it relieve a lot of pressure if more top universities embraced PsyD programs--with the support of mental health grant funding-- that trained outstanding clinicians, and stopped denigrating them as somehow less worthy than their academically focused counterparts? Imagine a medical school that looks down its nose at those who seek to treat patients, or a law school that turns away those who admit to wanting to represent clients. Yet this is the situation for many applying to psychology programs. So strange. The attempt to combine academia, scientific funding and professional licensing all under one roof has, it seems to me, created a great identity crisis and nearly insurmountable hurdles for most applicants.

So I've heard from people that "every year gets harder" for getting into psychology programs (particularly clinical psych), but this year is just insane. I'm feeling so frustrated because I got waitlisted at the only school I got an interview from, and now I might not get into grad school this year despite applying to 15 programs. This is my second time applying to clinical programs, and this time I applied with 2 years of full-time research experience (plus 3 years part-time research experience), 3 glowing LOR including one well known PI, and a paper in revision which then was accepted for publication shortly after apps were due (I notified all my potential PIs right away) plus 1 paper under review and 2 in prep, plus 4 first authored posters and a dozen other posters I've worked on as second or third author. (My undergrad GPA was 3.95 so that also shouldn't be an issue). My supervisors, an associate and assistant professor at an R01, were confident I would receive several offers this year with my CV and after looking over my personal statement as well. And yet here we are... 
I'm sure I'm not the only qualified applicant facing this. And I also know that people who are receiving offers are super amazing so no shade to them. It just sucks that funding is so down this year and there were suddenly so many more applicants. 
I'm feeling especially frustrated today because a grad student in one of the labs I work in was asking for my help with stats, and it's like if I can teach current grad students things they don't know and still not get into a program, what the heck?! Is it even worth it to keep trying to get into this field? I just feel so discouraged. 
Feel free to vent about this crazy app season or anything else psychology field / application related below.