This year one million British people will turn to psychotherapists and counsellors. Most do an amazing job and are a vital support for people living with mental illness. But every so often therapy isn’t a positive experience because there are people offering bogus treatments that harm patients instead of helping them.
Perhaps the worst is ‘gay-to-straight conversion therapy’ where counsellors try to ‘cure’ a person’s homosexuality because they see it as an illness. These so-called therapists advise their male clients to take up rugby or have massages with other men as sure-fire ways of decreasing same-sex attraction. Then they delve into the patient’s past, blaming their homosexuality on sexual abuse or a poor relationship with a parent. All the while they claim to be helping but in fact they’re just reinforcing the shame and isolation that led the patient to seek help in the first place.
Of course, this isn’t therapy. It’s exploitation. It’s the exact opposite of what good counsellors offer and no one who treats patients in this way should be able to call themselves a professional therapist.
But they can, because in the UK therapists and counsellors aren’t regulated. Anyone can set themselves up as one with no training or proper oversight. While bad doctors can be struck off and barred from practicing in the UK, there’s no way of stopping conversion therapists or any other practitioner who is preying on vulnerable people and damaging rather than helping them. They can be kicked out of their professional bodies and lose their accreditation, but nothing stops them going on to humiliate and abuse more vulnerable patients in future.
It’s a scandal that this is allowed to go on and that it’s being funded by taxpayers’ money, but this government has done absolutely nothing about it. In fact, they cancelled Labour’s plans for proper regulation almost as soon as they got into office.
The number of people seeing therapists has tripled since the coalition came to power and yet the department for health is completely clueless about the dangers that some patients face.
I’ve asked Jeremy Hunt how much NHS money is being wasted on conversion therapy and how many people are being referred to it by their GPs, but his department had absolutely no idea. I asked how much the NHS has spent on treatment by unregulated therapists and how many people are being referred to these practitioners, but again the department for health doesn’t have the figures.
At best this is idleness by Jeremy Hunt whose department hasn’t even condemned conversion therapy outright. At worst it looks like he just doesn’t care about protecting the most vulnerable patients from serious abuse.
That’s why I’ve proposed a bill which, if accepted, would mean that ‘psychotherapist’ and ‘counsellor’ become protected titles. Practitioners would have to meet the necessary standards of qualifications and experience and anyone found abusing their position by offering bogus and harmful treatments would not just lose their accreditation they’d be struck off and banned from practice.
As we were reminded in Ed’s conference speech, mental health goes hand in hand with physical health, and we should take one just as seriously as the other. When the number of people being referred to mental health providers has risen tenfold in the last five years, it’s not acceptable that those who need help the most are given the least protection.
We need to end the free-for-all that’s letting a dangerous minority get away with abusing their positions, and if this government won’t stand up for vulnerable patients, Labour must.
————————————————–
Geraint Davies MP is member of parliament for Swansea West. He tweets @GeraintDaviesMP
————————————————–
Photo: TorbakHopper
Well said! Though you may find the professional body is reluctant to enforce action against its otherwise bona fide members.
This is so important, and sadly there is all kinds of terrible practice- both intentional and unintentional – by people who call themselves counsellors and psychotherapists. One alarmingly common problem is therapists abusing their position and starting relationships with clients, which is incredibly damaging, particularly when the client is unwell due to sexual abuse/violence. Lots of organisations aren’t regulated and have no complaints procedure, or if they do the complaints committee is not independent.
Formal regulation is only part of the solution. There are bodies like RCPsych BABCP BACP and UKCP who accredit therapists. All of them can – and sometimes will – crack down on abuse and unprofessional practice. None of them take a strong role in checking whether a practitioner is effective. Well validated outcome measures, such as CORE-OM, have been available and cheap to use for over a decade. Some practitioners still resist the robust evaluation of their work. Regulation that fails to find a way to measure which therapies/therapists are ineffective or downright harmful will be neither use nor ornament.
Patients don’t need another acronym to add to their collection of pointless health regulators.
“… allowing a dangerous minority get away with it…” [?] there is a vast majority of people, especially in some ecumenical circles and certainly in the armed services divisions who actually believe a person’s sexual prediliction assumes them unfit for duty, for that natter, any participation in community and public affairs. Its easy to say, ” whatever sails your boat…” when being asked [unbidden] to comment on a person’s private life, its harder to grasp the nettle and look into the why’s and wherefores of any given situation. Don’t throw-the-baby-out- with- the-bath-water when it comes to denouncing [some of] the good work done by [some of] mental health employees, as there are some pretty stout people out there doing sterling work for little or no financial return. Laws are all well and good in a Court of Law – the general public are hard-wired since Adam and Eve to vociferously reject anyone or anything who or which doesn’t fit the one size fits all categories. Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread comes to mind.
Well said- as an example, One of my patients, very unwell, was completely taken for a ride by bogus ‘therapists’ who didnt charge in cash but exacted ‘payments’ in the form of ‘power’- asking him to leave the family who were supporting him through a psychosis and telling him that he should refuse any help from statutory services- eventually they wanted ‘goods’- they worked with the worst parts of his illness, manipulating his false beliefs. He refused and returned to treatment , including NHS based non-pharmacologial help, and is gradually getting better. Although psychiatry doesn’t have all the answers there are at least safeguards and scrutiny- what happens at the bogus therapists happens behind closed doors and can cause serious harm.
Please also consider the amount of money being wasted by the NHS on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy/Psychological therapy as a “treatment” for adults and children with ME when what is needed is proper medical investigation into what is causing their illness with proper treatment for their symptoms. The Labour Party should hold the medical profession to account for the general widespread lack of knowledge about ME amongst healthcare professionals and the lack of biomedical research into the underlying causes of ME, which for children/teenagers is the most common cause of long-term absence from school.
Helen, as someone who suffered from ME in the past I share your sense of frustration about the lack of knowledge as to causation. But I wonder if we should therefore entirely rule out a psychological cause or contribution? The science of the mind is in its infancy and it is clear that bodily and mental processes affect each other in sometimes surprising ways. Psychosomatic effects can be very powerful, indeed debilitating. An open mind seems a good idea to me in this instance.
Ben, I’m sorry but I don’t agree with you and I think you should check your facts before posting such misleading information on this website. ME/Chronic Fatigue is a physical illness and the the total indifference to patients’ suffering by the medical establishment is a national scandal. The problem is that the medical establishment has lumped many different illnesses together under the CFS label. If you feel that there was a psychological cause for your ME then I don’t think you actually had ME but some other illness like depression which can manifest itself with similar symptoms. My daughter became ill after receiving the HPV vaccination (vaccinations are a known trigger for ME) three years ago and has been ill ever since with her symptoms becoming progressively worse and meaning that she cannot attend school at all at the moment. The only “treatment” she was initially offered was a psychiatrist (which I turned down). To even suggest that ME has an underlying psychological cause is insulting. Do you think that people actually choose to struggle in pain every day with a debilitating illness, missing out on all the pleasure in life. The difference is that people with psychological problems can’t face doing things, people with ME want to do things so much they sometimes push themselves to far and their illness becomes worse.
And furthermore, ME is recognised by the World Health Organisation as a neurological illness, something British healthcare professionals should recognise.
It must be awful for your daughter and for you to be powerless to help her. I can see you are in a great deal of pain. I would just say that I did suffer from ME and I cannot say what the cause w as. It is obviously a physical illness, I agree. Rather than post misleading information what I have said is that theories as to causation are underdetermined by the data. Not knowing is painful in itself. My heart goes out to you and I hope your daughter gets better soon.
Thanks Ben, I appreciate your response. There is someone in America trying to produce a new film to raise awareness about the reality of living with severe ME. The trailer is incredibly powerful. See the link here
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/959776320/canary-in-a-coal-mine
And in terms of awareness, my daughter is now under the care of a lovely specialist at UCL who is exploring every possibility for her symptoms. But only just over two weeks ago I had to call an ambulance because she woke in the night with chest pains finding it a struggle to breathe and with seizure-like symptoms (she has already had one possible seizure which is being investigated) and the paramedics told me they had never heard of ME. Instead I could see the looks between them suggesting that we were wasting their time. My daughter has struggled so much and lost so much of her teenage years and it angers me that there is no funding for biomedical research. The Labour Party needs to challenge this head on. Remember it was only fairly recently that Multiple Sclerosis was considered an illness that was “all in the head”.
I think this piece is in need of some contextualisation as this is not a simple matter. Conversion therapy is a small facet of a much wider debate. Until early 2011 the HPC was in discussion with psychotherapy and counselling organisations with a view to introducing statutory regulation by an external body – ie the HPC. This led to definitional problems about what is being regulated and what an appropriate standard would look like. As a labour Party member, former lawyer and trainee psychotherapist I’m agnostic on the matter, but the current govt felt that voluntary registers organised by the accrediting bodies such as bacp and ukcp should be assured by the state. It would be destructive to tear this model up without trying it I think.
It should be noted that ukcp bars its members from offering therapy that claims to be able to change sexuality.
But the balance between state-based assurance and the inability to properly define what is partly an analytic but largely a relational process is a tough one. We are dealing with the realms of subjectivity when talking about the mind and emotions and whilst I am in favour of more quantitative research in the field (there is vast amounts that shows conflicting results about efficacy already) we should bare in mind that different clients have differing outlooks and needs and will therefore benefit from a wide range of approaches being available – there is no one ‘correct’ approach. As someone drawn to the psychodynamic, there are aspects of other modalities that I can find challenging or fail to see the point of, but what works is what works for the client.
Am I opposed to conversion therapy? Well as someone who believes that we need to accept and show compassion for the aspects of our natures that we find challenging I absolutely do oppose it. But this debate is much wider than the question of unaccredited therapists taking advantage of feelings of guilt and self-hatred. I would say always look for a counsellor or therapist accredited by one of the membership organisations in the field to avoid abusive dynamics. I am unconvinced that a single state regulator defining the work and setting standards for a relational process that necessarily elicits challenging feelings is practical, and we should give assured voluntary registers a chance to operate. This can always be returned to if a pressing public interest is identified.
Finally, I would also say that introducing statutory fiat does not stop people from entering into unhealthy dynamics about their identities if that is what they ultimately want to do. If not from a quack ‘psychotherapist’, then from a quack ‘healer’ or a priest.
I have never heard of GP’s or the NHS funding ‘conversion therapy’ and do not believe it happens. If it had the Daily Mail would have highlighted it by now. And as for this therapy being allowed because the profession is not regulated- that is just rubbish. The only way of banning it is through legislation. Regulation of Counselling and Psychotherapy titles is irrelevant to this. Those offering this destructive form of ‘therapy’ would simply find a new title for it. I have read in Therapy Today that this MP also attacks ‘bogus’ therapists offering trauma treatment that is not NICE approved. This is just ignorant. Somatic Experiencing developed by Peter Levine, an international expert on Trauma, has healing millions world wide, and is not NICE approved, It is neither bogus or ineffective, otherwise NASSA would not utilise it. Also I have as a therapist had to help many clients from the harm caused by ‘NICE approved therapy. Its not as simple as he makes out. ALso if regulation was so effective, then why the Stafford Hospital scandal ? No I will not be voting Labour.