Psychotherapy and marketing

Professional qualification

Training and accreditation

In contrast to aviation, architecture, construction engineering, medicine, plumbing and so on, the skills required by  people who practise psychotherapy and the standards of practice needed to ensure competent, scrupulous behaviour cannot be measured objectively.   Although the necessary skills can be enhanced by attending courses, lectures, seminars, ‘workshops’ and so on, any 'qualification' awarded as a result is worthless as an indication of the practician's competence or integrity.   

Supervision

True accreditation

Psychotherapy has no 'career structure'.   The professionalism of its practicians is best measured by the efforts that they make to become redundant.   The value of accreditation by fellow practicians is  impossible to assess and the only people truly qualified to assess practicians' competence and integrity are their clients.   
Prospective clients must therefore decide what such terms as 'professional qualification', 'accreditation', 'training' and ‘supervision’ mean in practice.   

'We must not expect that the personal qualities of the psychotherapist will spring from formal instruction; the professional demands are much more far-reaching and among them there is something that most decisively cannot be taught.' Karl Jaspers⁽¹⁾

'A person is usually assumed to be competent because he or she has had a specific amount of academic training and supervised experience, although why this should ensure competence is not specified. Ignored are the subtle questions of what precisely it is that professionals are supposed to do, and how well they do it.    These two issues are more complex than is often realised and deserve further elaboration.' Daniel B. Hogan⁽²⁾

'... the prospective client should take nothing for granted where the qualifications of a therapist are concerned.   The most essential consideration is to be able to form a proper working relationship; all other factors should be examined in this light.' Joel Kovel⁽³⁾

'(Psychotherapy) ... is a craft the aptitude for which derives more from a general experience of living than is generally supposed.' Peter Lomas⁽⁴⁾

'(Training in psychotherapy) ... should start from the recognition that a learned technique not only cannot substitute for a more elemental capacity to heal, but may actually inhibit this capacity: that it should be less a course of instruction than an attempt to increase the individual's unique capacity to help.' Peter Lomas⁽⁵⁾

'Though (simplified models of human behaviour) may be of some use in marshalling the "facts" of mass behaviour, they are unlikely to deal effectively with the complexities of the individual case and it is small wonder that a reasonably intelligent and sensitive person is likely to make better guesses about others if he relies more on the skills he has spent his life developing than on the crudely insensitive conceptual equipment of traditional psychology.' David Smail⁽⁶⁾

'There are many schools of psychotherapy but results appear to depend on the personal qualities, experience and worldly wisdom of the therapist rather than on the theoretical basis of the method.' Robert M. Youngson (ed.)⁽⁷⁾