Why The Professionals Directory?
My passion for the Professionals Directory came from my own search for a Clinical Supervisor when completing the 1st year of Family Therapy training. Having been a therapist for nearly a decade, I searched on one of the biggest counselling directories to find someone who could assist me in my next steps.
Following the instructions I searched under the category of ‘Family Therapy’, Family Therapist actually being a protected title alongside Art Therapist. I was delighted that it came up with so many hits. I was going to be well on my way into year 2 of my training.
Sadly, that’s where the excitement ended. I looked at the profiles of the first 36 therapists who were listed. I found only ONE therapist who held appropriate family therapy qualifications, 5 who held the foundation certificate which I was just finishing (the 1st of 4 years certification to become a family therapist), 1 therapist who I could not establish their qualifications from their listing, and 29 who had no training in Family Therapy or it’s associated theoretical basis at all! Whilst you could believe that some have forgotten to update their profile when logging on to tick the box to say that they can now work with families, I doubted that this applied to 80% of those advertising to work with this client group.
This is an issue that I have been aware of for quite some time. In my role as Head of Psychological Services for a Specialist Mental Health Charity, it’s something we come across on a regular basis – and from all directions. Counsellors who have trained and qualified to work with adults apply to us for work as they would really like to work with children. Sadly, we have to turn them down because they simply don’t hold adequate training. Members of the public have no idea that counselling is unregulated and that these difficulties exist. Not once, in nearly a decade of private practice, nor through 20 years of the charity’s counselling service, which see’s hundreds of clients a year, have I ever been asked to provide evidence of my qualifications, professional indemnity insurance or professional membership to a client. The public are simply unaware that anybody, without qualification, could be working with them personally, or their loved ones.
This problem is endemic. Current directories, once a counsellor registers, and their initial qualification is checked, enable them to advertise as being able to work with any client group they wish. So, on the day of qualifying from an adult counselling course, counsellors can advertise that they work with children, young people, couples, families etc. However, these groups each need a vastly different skill base to that of the talking therapy which they have learned in order to work with one adult in the room!
This is why we need The Professionals Directory! To ensure that counsellors and psychotherapists are ONLY able to list as working with client groups that they hold adequate training to work with.
Article by: Emma Farrell
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