Blogging about mental health issues
Each week we publish blog posts on a whole range of topics, relating in some way to mental health — written by Mind staff, service users and health and policy professionals. Some blog posts may not reflect official Mind policy.
We welcome comments and questions on our posts, but have a few ground rules to keep the site welcoming and interesting to every body. The first rule is the most important: be respectful of other commenters and bloggers.
Psychotherapy regulation:
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18 April 2011
Plan B on Psychotherapy RegulationThis is a guest post from mental health nurse and blogger, Zarathustra (of the former Mental Nurse blog).
Despite the complex work they do with very vulnerable people, counsellors and psychotherapists are surprisingly under-regulated. Anyone can call themselves a psychotherapist, and there is no obligation to belong to a professional association. This can increase the risk of abuse and make it harder to make a complaint. Government plans to regulate the industry are sadly being watered down by the Coalition.
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2 February 2011
No longer a second class citizenOn a visit to a local Mind a couple of weeks ago, I met Helen (not her real name) who told me about some of her mental health experiences. She started having problems when she was at school, but nobody thought about mental health, so she was put down as the “class oddball”.
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10 December 2009
Psychotherapy needs regulating to protect the public
A guest post by Zarathustra of the Mental Nurse blog.Imagine you're a professional working with vulnerable people -say, a doctor, social worker, nurse or arts therapist. Suppose you then got struck off, maybe for breaching confidentiality, or for taking drugs in front of your clients, or crossing professional boundaries, or financially exploiting and verbally abusing them.
Or, if you happen to be arts therapist Derek Gale, for doing all of the above and promptly being struck off by the Health Professions Council as a result. One minute you're a successful professional, running something more resembling a religious cult than a therapeutic practice, merrily charging people large sums of money to financially, sexually and emotionally exploit them. The next you're off the HPC register and your lucrative income has been taken away from you. What's a poor abusive therapist to do, eh?
Luckily for Derek - though less so for the rest of us - there was a handy little loophole. All he had to do was call himself a psychotherapist and counsellor, and he could just carry on practicing as though nothing had happened. He could do it because "arts therapist" is a protected title, but "psychotherapist" and "counsellor" are not.
A protected title means precisely that - a job title that is protected by law from being used by any con artist, quack or yahoo. Doctor, nurse, occupational therapist, dietitian...these are all protected titles and you can be prosecuted if you use them without being registered with the appropriate professional body.Treat somebody's veruccas while pretending to be a chiropodist, and you can be fined up to £5000. But when it comes to sitting in a room with somebody who may have mental health problems or been terribly traumatised, and have them pay you to explore the deepest, most volatile parts of their psyche - anyone is allowed to do that.
It's worth remembering that the history of psychotherapy has examples of abuse by psychotherapists going right back to the foundations of the profession. Both Freud and Jung engaged in acts towards their patients that would be considered serious misconduct. Freud invented his entire Seduction Theory in order to dismiss his patients' accounts of sexual abuse as mere fantasies. Jung had a long-running sexual relationship with one of his patients, Sabina Spielrein.It's also worth remembering that psychotherapists, particularly psychoanalysts, have at times had a reputation for cliquey, even slightly cultish behaviour - a good read of Jeffrey Masson's Final Analysis provides some shocking illustrations of this. Without proper regulation, there's plenty of scope for an abusive therapist to do a lot of damage to already damaged people.
Psychotherapy isn't entirely a unregulated free-for-all. Professional bodies do exist. Over 70 of them are listed by the umbrella organisation, the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). They tend to have rather Judean People's Front names - Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy, Institute of Group Analysis, Forum for Independent Psychotherapists, Association for Family Therapy, Institute of Family Therapy and so on. Each of these organisations have their own members register, and you can make a complaint against a member.
Complaints procedures vary from organisation to organisation, but these procedures often fall far short of what one might expect if complaining, say, against a doctor to the General Medical Council, or against a nurse to the Nursing and Midwifery Council.Depending on which organisation your psychotherapist belongs to, you may find that the complaints are resolved behind closed doors, with little or no accountability. You may be expected to provide your own counsel. You may find yourself expected to enter into a process of "negotiation and mediation" with the psychotherapist you complained against.
Such organisations tend to claim that the use of negotiation and mediation is to resolve any transference issues that might be the cause of the complaint, and to help resolve disputes informally. A more cynical individual (such as me) might suggest that they could be used in order to bully somebody into dropping the complaint.
Assuming that a complaint is successful and a psychotherapist is struck off by their member organisation, there's absolutely nothing to stop them simply going off and registering with one of the others; or indeed, not bothering to register with any of them.
Fortunately, this sorry state of affairs may soon come to an end. Moves are underway to make psychotherapists and counsellors protected titles, and for these professions to join their arts therapist colleagues on the Health Professions Council register. This needs to happen, preferably sooner rather than later. Only by doing so can individuals like Derek Gale be kept out of the psychotherapy profession, and members of the public can have the reassurance of knowing that when they pay for therapy, they're paying somebody who is accountable for their actions.Zarathustra, Mental Nurse
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8 December 2009
Cats to set up therapeutic centre?
A while ago I wrote a blog post about the fact that Derek Gale, an arts therapist found guilty of multiple and varied malpractice, is still legally entitled to continue to practice as a psychotherapist because counselling and psychotherapy is not statutorily regulated.This means that anyone can practice as a counsellor or psychotherapist – you don’t need any basic training and there’s no code of conduct that you have to adhere to. In my blog, I pointed out that Sorcha, my cat, could technically set herself up as a bona fide therapist.
Little did I know that an adventurous feline in Cumbria was soon to make that great leap into the psychological professions. Chris Jackson, presenter of Inside Out in the North East and Cumbria, decided to register pet cat George as a hypnotherapist in order to demonstrate the lax regulation of hypnotherapy.
Although I would be very surprised if one of the professional counselling or psychotherapy bodies would actually register a furry friend, the point is that you don’t even need to be registered with a professional body in order to practice as a counsellor or psychotherapist.
With hypnotherapy, counselling and psychotherapy all lacking proper regulation, it looks as though nothing will prevent George and Sorcha from setting up the first therapeutic centre to bill clients in milk and mice.
Admittedly, people do not need protection from rogue feline therapists. But they do need better regulation to prevent untrained or abusive therapists from continuing to practice. That is why Mind is campaigning for the statutory regulation of psychotherapists and counsellors.
Mind is currently looking into what type of regulation and complaints processes users of mental health services would like to see in counselling and psychotherapy. Comment below or email Mariam Kemple to give your thoughts on the issue.
Mariam Kemple, Policy and Campaigns Officer
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