For twenty episodes, we’ve been examining the architecture of a profession under strain, including its history, its blind spots, and the pressures it was never designed to hold. In this final episode, we step back from diagnosis and turn toward orientation. Not a to-do list, and not a call to fix what’s broken, but an invitation to understand where we’re standing, and what it means to be a stakeholder in what comes next.

We explore:

• The beauty of the boring: Why slow, rigorous data, like the PACT survey, matters more than outrage when systems lose touch with lived experience
• No-blame cultures: What aviation and nursing can teach us about designing systems that tolerate human error instead of punishing it.
• Internal architecture: How to hold professional dignity while working inside institutions that move slowly by design.
• The wire: Why staying present with complexity may be harder (and more generative) than choosing a side.

Connect:

• Contact Megan: therapyinsights.com/insideslp
• PACT Survey: pactsurvey.com

Anger can feel clarifying, but without context, it rarely leads anywhere new. In this episode, we step back from the outrage cycle to examine what’s sitting underneath it: systemic grief, misaligned training models, and the shame many clinicians carry inside a profession that was never fully built to hold them.

We explore:

• The arsonist parable: Why chasing villains distracts from the work of rebuilding.
• A profession at its Flexner moment: What medicine’s shift away from the generalist model reveals about where SLP may be headed.
• The normalization of shame: How outdated training structures offload systemic gaps onto individual clinicians.
• The paradox of the nine: What becomes visible when we hold multiple professional perspectives at once.

Sources:

• Duffy, T. P. (2011). The Flexner report―100 years later. The Yale journal of biology and medicine, 84(3), 269.

The intensity in SLP spaces right now isn’t a sign of collapse. It’s the friction of a profession that has grown faster than the structures built to support it. In this episode, we slow the noise down to examine what’s actually underneath the debates, through data, psychology, and the real set of options the field keeps circling.

We explore:

• The preparation gap: What the 2020 Ad Hoc report acknowledges about the limits of our current training model.
• Displaced aggression: Why frustration so often turns inward when systems feel unreachable.
• The doctorate conversation: How the push for an SLPD reflects a hunger for depth, not just status.
• The domino effect: What changes like abolishing the CCC, unionizing, or rethinking undergraduate training would actually set in motion.

Connect:

• Contact Megan: therapyinsights.com/insideslp
• PACT Survey: pactsurvey.com