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- Darian Leader calls for a waaaahmbulance
- Regulation of Psychotherapy – why it matters
- Regulation of Psychotherapy – Who’s Against it
- Regulation of Psychotherapy – More from its opponents
- Psychotherapy self regulation – a licence to carry on abusing?
- Psychologists join the HPC register
- The sham of self-regulation
- Regulation of Psychotherapy – A Psychotherapist Responds (1)
- Regulation of Psychotherapy – A Psychotherapist Responds (2)
- Regulation of Psychotherapy – Response to Zarathustra
- Regulation of Psychotherapy – Another Arts Therapist struck off
- Regulation of Psychotherapy: The Maresfield Report (1)
- Regulation of Psychotherapy: Maresfield Report (2)
- Regulation of Psychotherapy: Something rotten in the state of Denmark?
- Regulation of Psychotherapy: Something Rotten in the State of Denmark (2)
- Professor Andrew Samuels caught lying about his role in abuse case
- An Open letter to the UKCP
This happened because arts therapist is a protected title, same as doctors, nurses and occupational therapists. You can go to jail for using a protected title if you’re not registered with the appropriate body. Meanwhile, any quack, charlatan or yahoo can call themselves a psychotherapist or a counsellor, regardless of qualifications, background or criminal convictions. This isn’t safe for the public; hence psychotherapists and counsellors need to come under a statutory register such as that of the HPC.
There’s a vociferous, and at times slightly unhinged campaign going on from a coalition of psychotherapists opposing the regulation proposals. They’ve now published the Maresfield Report (PDF File) outlining their objections. It’s been described as a “devastating critique” and “a major embarrassment to HPC” by no less an authority than themselves.
So, what’s their objection? Well, among other things, they’re concerned that the Health Professions Council will make psychotherapists wear spacesuits.
Well, not exactly spacesuits. I’m exaggerating somewhat. They’ve pointed out that the HPC’s Draft Standards of Competence for Psychotherapists and Counsellors (PDF file) includes references to protective equipment.
The HPC standards have been drafted with hardly any thought as to the specificity of the talking therapies: there are references to the use of equipment, to infection control, and to the wearing of protective clothing. The fact that requirements that are obviously tailored to medical work within hospitals or NHS trusts feature so predominantly in the HPC standards begs the question of how much attention has been paid to the particularity of the talking therapies, (page 48)
Psychotherapists in protective clothing? Lacanians in biohazard suits? Person-centred counsellors in scuba gear?
As it happens, the bit of the HPC standards that they’re getting their knickers in a twist about is this one.
3a.3 understand the need to establish and maintain a safe a practice environment
- be aware of applicable health and safety legislation, and any relevant safety policies and procedures in force in the workplace, such as incident reporting, and be able to act in accordance with these
- be able to work safely, including being able to select appropriate hazard control and risk management, reduction or elimination techniques in a safe manner in accordance with health and safety legislation
- be able to select appropriate protective equipment and use it correctly
- be able to establish safe environments for practice, which minimise risks to service users, those treating them, and others, including the use of hazard control and particularly infection control
In other words, it’s just one of those health and safety clauses that come into the category of “dreary but necessary”, including the need to “select appropriate protective equipment and use it correctly”. The keyword there being “appropriate”.
For example, would it be appropriate to expect arts therapists, dietiticians and other HPC-regulated professions to come to work wearing one of these? Well, no, that wouldn’t be appropriate.
Funny, yes. Appropriate, no.
However, if they did happen to be working with a patient or client who had an infectious disease, then it might be reasonable to expect them to use some appropriate equipment. That “appropriate equipment” might well be nothing more complex than some of this.
Here’s something that’s slightly odd. The Maresfield Report is saying that the HPC’s standards “have been drafted with hardly any thought as to the specificity of the talking therapies”, yet in scrolling down to that one bit about health and safety and infection control, they seem to scrolled right past a long list of standards that seem deeply concerned with the “specificity of the talking therapies”. Here, have a look. There’s plenty of these sorts of standards.
- be able to recognise and manage the dynamics of power and authority
- be able to build, maintain and end therapeutic relationships with clients
- be able to reflect on and engage with complex and sometimes contradictory information elicited from the client in order to progress/develop a working understanding of psychological difficulties and their origins
- be able to make use of supervision, consistent with their theoretical approach
To this ignorant non-therapist, these seem pretty specific to the talking therapies
In all fairness, the report doesn’t ignore these other standards (you know, the ones that supposedly don’t exist). It then goes on to declare them invalid using the most spectacular extrapolations and leaps of logic this side of a Daily Mail editorial. For example:
The requirement that psychotherapists and counsellors must ‘recognise the need for effective self-management of workload and resources and be able to practice accordingly’ may be applicable for staff working in NHS or organisational contexts but has nothing to do with the practice of psychotherapy. (page 50)
What, independent psychotherapists don’t need to self-manage their workload?
The requirement that psychotherapists and counsellors ‘understand the importance of maintaining their own health’ is also inapplicable to the majority of schools of therapy. Therapists can drink, smoke and lead sedentary lifestyles just like anyone else. They do not have a duty to conform to any particular imperative of physical wellbeing obtaining in any particular historical period. (page 50)
Who’s suggesting that this means the HPC will ban therapists from smoking or drinking? The HPC currently regulates paramedics. If all paramedics were banned from having a fag or a pint after work then 90% of the ambulance service would have been struck off by now. “Understanding the importance of maintaining your own health” does not necessarily mean living the lifestyle of Gillan McKeith (and who’d want to? All those mung beans must really get people down.)
There’s lots more of this sort of stuff. It’s all very Daily Mail-esque in a “find something relatively inoffensive, and then contort it so as to make yourself as offended by it as possible” kind of way. I found it quite amusing, until I got to this paragraph:
Psychotherapists and counsellors are required here to ‘understand their duty of care with regard to the legislation on safeguarding children, young people and vulnerable adults’. There is a question here of differentiating the duty of care of the healthcare professional and the responsibility of a therapist. Many therapists would believe that they certainly have a duty in relation to their clinical work, but this duty must be differentiated from the standard of notion of duty of care, especially when it concerns questions such as confidentiality. (page 49)
The other bits were funny, but this isn’t funny at all. When it comes to issues of child protection or protection of vulnerable adults, then there is absolutely no ‘question of differentiating the duty of care of the healthcare professional and the responsibility of a therapist’. Child protection and POVA are everybody’s business. It doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor, a psychotherapist, a teacher or a lollipop lady. Everybody has a fundamental duty to report abuse or neglect. No exceptions.
As for the final sentence of the above quote, if you don’t understand where confidentiality ends and child protection/POVA begins (and whoever wrote that sentence clearly doesn’t), then you are fundamentally unsafe to practice. Period.
There’s plenty more examples of Epic Fail within the pages of the Maresfield Report, but I think I’ll save the rest for a second post – partly for space reasons, and partly because the more I read of it, the more I get an uncontrollable urge to repeatedly smack my head onto the desk.
So, for now, I’ll just leave you guys to mull over that paragraph where they try to blur the boundaries on child protection and POVA. If that isn’t an argument to immediately get these dimwits accountable to a statutory regulator, then I don’t know what is.
I really don’t see that they’ve got a leg to stand on, given that arts therapy is already regulated. Surely if regulation was gonna destroy the OMG UNIQUE AND FRAGILE SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE nature of the profession, it would do so there. Or are they seriously arguing that arts therapy was already an over-medicalised tool of The Man?
Exactly. If all these disastrous things were going to happen to psychotherapists, then it would have already happened to arts therapists, and it hasn’t. It’s a load of complete cobblers.
Given the potential length and intimacy of therapeutic engagement with patients/clients/profit-centres, one would’ve expected calls for greater rather than less regulation.
And if I find myself (as I have done) somehow in possession of the counsellor’s home address and telephone number – I think I’ve the right call someone to bring out the Big Stick.
differentiating the duty of care of the healthcare professional and the responsibility of a therapist
wtf?
I’d like to be able to rest easily knowing that this kind of Bullshit won’t fly in the halls of Power.
Please someone reassure me.
Was this campaign started by Derek Gale?
Even I understand the definition of confidentiality. Fuckwits.
Lola x
Lola, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was started by Derek Gale, after all, two of the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy’s key members (Professor Andrew Samuels and Professor Brian Thorne) are friends and supporters of Derek Gale. I guess that tells you all you need to know!
OMG.
Yes, OMG! During the HPC process, Gale, at one point, claimed that Andrew Samuels was willing to be his supervisor. This was offered in order that the HPC would lift their suspension of Gale so that he could continue to practice. However, Samuels’ insurers would not permit it.
Brian Thorne, however, appeared as a witness for Gale during the HPC hearing (7 April 2009). It’s all in the transcripts if you want to read it, just contact the HPC!
To quote Thorne during the hearing:
‘As I asked myself, ‘why am I coming here’, especially in a somewhat ailing condition, I think I had three answers really. I was coming because in recent times I have come to respect your [Gale's] honesty and integrity as a person and as a professional, and that for me has considerable meaning; secondly, I’ve come to appreciate you as somebody who is deeply reflective about the work that he does; that he is prepared, as it were, to look at his work with new eyes, fresh perspectives and so on, if that is what is actually clearly being called for. But to respond quite directly to your last question, I sometimes feel that it may be that it is the very fact that, for goodness knows how many years ago, I think it’s about 30 years, you have been involved in therapeutic work, which is actually rare, which is I think also extremely demanding, but also has within it quite a number of important issues I think which mainstream therapeutic approaches can probably learn from and benefit from. But I am aware of the fact that because of your particular therapeutic work and your particular orientations, you are in effect in a very small category of practitioners. It sometimes feel that you may be in a category of one.’
Well, how wrong can one man be? Gale, honest and full of integrity?! A man who lies under oath, who deceives his clients, who steals milk from Sainsburys, who smokes cannabis and gives it to his clients to smoke, who bullys his clients into giving him large sums of money, who punches clients in order to get them to sing the way he wants them to, who sought to get himself removed from the HPC register once he knew there was a complaint lodged against him….shall I go on?!
And the idea that mainstream therapeutic approaches can learn from and benefit from Gale’s approach, well, I am just dumbfounded by this!!!! What are these people on? Clearly, another planet!!!!
Actually, a cheeky part of me wonders if the Maresfield Report was written by a HPC mole looking to discredit the anti-regulation campaign. If so, they’re doing a good job of it.
Thank you guys.
Let’s not forget that Gale has always been deeply ingratiated into the anti regulation sect of psychotherapists. Although he has no psychotherapy qualifications whatsoever nor has he bothered to in any recognised way build or maintain any ongoing professional development, Gale has been welcomed unquestioned into the very heart of the anti regulation camp. Many of these anti regulationists were very aware of Gale running a psychotherapy cult based on himself being the father of his client “family”. They openly socialised with his clients at the Gale Centre and even invited Gale clients to their own homes for social occassions. Professor Samuels is a known friend of Gale and (as written above) tried to get Gale off the hook with the HPC despite Gale at the time being under suspension from the UKCP (for whom Samuels is a media spokesperson)and UKAHPP with complaints still outstanding.
Gale manipulated himself into this position whereby he was in the founding groups of both the UK Association of Humanistic Psychotherapy Practitioners (UKAHPP) and the British Association of Dramatherapists (BADth – who ironically have gone legit and become an integrated part of the HPC and facilitated the HPC case against Gale) by way of becoming their vanity publishing gimp through his Gale Centre Books publishing business. Through this he published unmoderated books and papers by the likes of Prof Brian Thorne, Eric Whitton, Prof Windy Dryden, John Rowan et al many of whom are recognised as being not only public supporters of Gale and his mehodology of one but also pro actively anti HPC regualtion.
Gale himself acknowledges that his knowledge of psychotherapy comes almost exclusively from these books with lines like “he didn’t want to lose this interesting client and he knew from one of John Rowan’s books that initial telephone contact was very important” when writing in his unpublished “fictional” confession novel about how a therapist abuses his clients financially and sexually. Gale apologist at the HPC hearings Prof John Rowan is also an honorary lifetime member of the UKAHPP whose late chairman Eric Whitton (another Gale crony)lied to me and tried to pressure me into dropping my complaints as did their current board member Bill Stanley (I have the letters and written evidence).
As for Professor Brian Thorne, well in “Controversies in Psychotherapy” Gale calls him “courageous” for having stripped naked and (in my terms) indecently exposed himself to a vulnerable female client who he repeatedly allowed to strip naked in front of him. Gale seems to have used this as some sort of validation for his own sexual abuse of clients through unmediated use of pornography screenings and pressurised nude encounter groups. Gale is also known to have intimidated body concsious clients by threatening to have them strip naked in front of groups as justification for him verbally abusing them eg ” I can call you big titted (fat, skinny, ugly – as he required to humiliate – his pattern very rarely changed) because you dont recognise that that is how you are viewed by everyone – you should ask yourself why are you rejecting my honesty?” And Professor Brian Thorne of University of East Anglia – responsible for the training and supervision of upcoming trainee counsellors and psychotherapists publically states that he considers the untrained charlatan Gale has something to teach mainstream psychotherapy !!!!!!!
The only odd one out among Gale’s friends and accolytes seems to be Prof Windy Dryden of Goldsmiths College who acknowledges that he considered Gale to be a close personal friend of over twenty years and for whom Gale published several books. Now Prof Dryden’s reputation and expertise are beyond reproach and as far as I am aware he is not part of any anti HPC or anti regulation sect or coalition but Gale did make a point during the HPC hearings of calling Prof Dryden a liar when a letter from Dryden was read to the hearing by the legal assessor becuase Gale claimed that Drden had been thereatened and intimidated into not supporting him. Which I persoanlly find interesting because I have an e mail copy in which Professor Dryden tanatamount to calls me a liar to Gale with regards to the fact that I had telephone conversations and written communication with Dryden about Gale running a cult. It seems that at least one person in Gale’s entourage saw the damage that association with him could do to his reputation and jumped ship. Maybe press exposure had something to do with it
http://www.timeshighereducatio.....ioncode=26
The very serious issue with regards to the people that appear to be anti HPC regulation and their association with Gale is that many of them are in positions of responsibilty for the training of upcoming counsellors and psychotherapists. How can someone like Thorne seriously teach ethics when he is quite happy to get his willy out and flash it at clients then publically defend the unqualified buffoon who called him “courageous”? Colin Feltham of Sheffield Uni (another Gale crony through publishing) has publically defended Gale as being “unorthodox” and “risk taking” but less harmful to clients than the abuse of university employees by the RAE
requirements!!!!!!!
If anyone reading this is a position of interviewing newly qualified counsellors or psychotherapists please ask a lot of very searching questions about their understandings of ethical behaviour and good practise – the supermarket question might be agood place to start.
Thank you and good night.
H
Sorry to be a pain guys but here’s a small addendum to the above – if you were under any misapprehension that the Universities themselves would monitor the ethical standards of their lecturers and professors then think again – Univeristy of East Anglia have refused to give a reassurance that Prof Thorne is appropriately supervised or has given an undertaking that he no longer considers it appropriate to expose himself to clients or trainees. Sheffield also declined to give any evidence to support Colin Feltham’s claim of no harm caused by Gale’s methods. Only Goldsmith’s actually did anything about Gale claiming associtaion through Dryden.
In 2007 the Swedish department of health investigated psychotherapy training in Sweden – a summary of their report in English is at the link here – they found most establishments were seriously failing. Would a similar investigation by the DoH NICE or HPC find any different here?
[Mildly edited by MN
]
As someone who was at the sharp end of Derek Gale’s practice for a number of years, I have to commend HowardM and his analysis. In my opinion DG was very manipulative in all his dealings with oversight of his practice, because he believed, and I am sure that he still does, that small injustices and breaches of power are allowed, because the end justifies the means. I understand that DG represented himself at the HPC hearing, I think that tells you all you need to know about his belief in his way of working. I am sure that he thought he could manipulate the hearing to get the result that he thought to be the right one. But because the oversight was there, in the room, he was observed for what he was and he was struck off from the HPC. He needed to be, in my opinion. That showed the power that oversight can have, given the chance. Remember, the only reason that DG was at the hearing was because of a huge effort of some of his clients. Where was the oversight from the many bodies he belonged to when the abuses went on? they didn’t have the power. Lets hope they do in the future.