There is an ongoing debate in the UK about the statatuory regulation of psychotherapy.

Following on from the high profile striking off of the psychotherapy cult leader Derek Gale some of those who condoned his practises and even made extensive representations to the Health Professions Council in defence of his abusive actions have formed an organisation to promote non compliance with the law and regulatorary authorities. This group of self interested professors have compiled what they call the Maresfield Report which far from being any sort of authorative report is actually nothing more than an ill informed rant against the HPC . This Maresfield report seems to be the gospel to which this group of cult apologists are swearing alligence so as to promote bad psychotherapy practise over flawed but well intentioned government regulation of psychotherapy.

Most shockingly the leader of this cult of anti regulationists, Prof Andrew Samuels, was recently elected as chair of the UK Council For Psychotherapists (UKCP) an organisation that acts like a trade Union for the various voluntary bodies who are supposed to self regulate psychotherapy at the moment.

My colleague Howard Martin, who was a lead complainant against the cult leader Dereke Gale has written the following open letter to Professor Andrew Samuels. Anyone interested in psychotherapy in the UK should really read it to get an insight into what is really going on.

Open Letter to Professor Andrew Samuels on the occasion of his election to the chair of the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP).

5th December 2009.

Dear Professor Samuels,

Congratulations on your achievement in being elected as chair of the UKCP. They now have the leadership they so richly deserve.

I have no doubt that ever since you started your career as the leader of a commune style theatre group way back in the 70s you have considered yourself to be a charismatic leader who, despite having constructed an enviable reputation for yourself, has quite possibly always felt that the power and recognition you deserve has been kept from you by the machinations of others. The UKCP were so moribund and in such a state of implosion that they were forced to restructure their constitution to allow an open vote for the position of Chair. This allowed your single issue policies of conflict with the HPC to strike a chord with those who have grown very fat and complacent exploiting the unregulated free for all that is the current state of psychotherapy. Even UKCP CEO David Pink indentified on the UKCP website that the voting was flawed and controversial; “The campaigning period has seen heated disputation and dissatisfaction with the election process”. So as if Wolfy Smith had been catapulted in as Prime Minister through electoral reform befuddlement you have now been thrown from the metaphorical backstreet pub of Tooting right into the spotlight of national politics and government policy on psychotherapy. Your street brawling agitprop style and paranoid rants will now quite legitimately be weighed in balance against the personal actions, ethical standards and manifesto proposals of you, your friends, associates and colleagues.

There is a presumption that you and your friends and colleagues in the Alliance For Counselling and Psychotherapy Against State Regulation (ACPASR) will now exploit the half arsed UKCP constitutional changes to start your putsch on the UKCP. In a recent letter from David Pink (UKCP CEO) I was assured that the UKCP did not support your policy of title change to avoid regulation nor did they support “principled non compliance” with the law. While I am sure David Pink is already clearing his desk can you too personally give the same assurance or will you now just bludgeon the UKCP into acceptance of your potentially criminal intentions? I have no doubt the UKCP will now disappear even further to the lunatic fringes and be indistinguishably merged with the aims and objectives of the ACPASR with its attendant requirement that the membership swear allegiance to the discredited gospel that you call the Maresfield Report?

In your manifesto videos you come across, in my opinion, as a person who is full of anger and vitriol against a system run by the HPC that you have taken no time to understand. Your personal attacks and open threats against Marc Seale as CEO of the HPC and his staff not only depict you as a vicious bully but also seem to represent an anger that does not stem from any justifiable doubts about the HPC but from a deep seated fear of loss of your power over your peers, clients and students. Do you really fear the HPC or do you fear any authority that will hold you to account realistically and legally for your actions?

It is widely known that one of your key complaints against the HPC is “The standards being proposed for the HPC registration are scandalously low. Almost anyone will be able to be registered.” This is a very admirable stance to set very high standards for those who call themselves psychotherapists. Some would also admire you for your willingness to hypocritically ignore this position when it came to protecting the interests of your friend the discredited psychotherapy cult leader Derek Gale who was struck off by the HPC, UKCP and AHPP in June of this year. In fact your involvement in the Gale case also seems to directly undermine your position that the HPC are ineffective in protecting the public, because despite the best efforts of you and your colleagues that is exactly what they did.

I am sure you need no reminding of your submissions to the HPC / Derek Gale interim suspension hearing in December 2007. As you know Derek Gale is another charismatic figure who started out in hippy theatre communes from which you share a common heritage and cultural root. However, unlike yourself Gale has absolutely no qualifications whatsoever in psychotherapy. No doctorates, no professorships, no university references, not even a city and guilds in carpentry (though he has likened himself to Jesus on more than one occasion) but Gale was warmly welcomed into your circle of friends and colleagues because he ran a vanity book publishing company that published thesis and psychobabble books with scant (if any) authoritive peer review or moderation. From this he learned to parrot therapy buzzwords and phrases which obviously impressed not only his clients but also you. Gale openly called himself a psychotherapy guru and it was common knowledge among your associates that he ran his “therapy community” as a cult like family with himself referred to as the father. At the time of your public support for Gale he was suspended by the HPC, UKCP and AHPP pending investigations into alleged sexual abuse of vulnerable clients, physical violence against clients, financial exploitation of clients and untold number of breaches of professional boundaries most of which have subsequently been found to be true by the HPC. You seemed very keen to help Gale to legitimately carry on abusing. In fact although you didn’t attend the hearing you were so keen to help your friend off the hook with the HPC that you made yourself available on the phone in support of your submissions to the HPC on his behalf. As Gale was also suspended by the UKCP, who you were then a media spokesperson for, was it your intention that getting Gale off the hook at the HPC would also get him off the hook at the UKCP? It certainly seems so since you failed to declare any conflicts of interest in your relationships with Gale and the UKCP. Is it not fair to say that if you had your way Gale would have easily exploited your public endorsement of his cult like practise to carry on his abusive behaviour under your supervision? Luckily the HPC panel was not made up of your and Gale’s associates and they were sufficiently independent and technically skilled enough to not fall for your solicitations. Gale’s public suspension was upheld until he was finally struck off. From my experience of dealing with the AHPP and UKCP I am pretty confident that if you had made the same submissions to any of the self regulation bodies with a panel made up of your colleagues it is pretty much a forgone conclusion that Gale would have been allowed off of his suspension. This of course raises the question; is your anger at the HPC informed by your experience of having your authority undermined by them in the Gale case? Did the HPC humiliate you in front of your peers? Was your inability to help your friend a warning bell that the end was near for the cosy client blaming disciplinary set up that you so desperately want to maintain through adherence to the Maresfield Report?

Contrary your claims that striking off by the HPC is ineffective because an errant therapist can change title (in the same way as you have openly encouraged and stated that you intend to do if HPC regulation goes through) to avoid regulation and carry on practising, Gale has been publically admonished and openly ostracised to such an extent that he is now rumoured to be resorting to taking his practise to South America. Thus the obligation for HPC / UK public protection is fulfilled in extremis. However unless he also changes his name any would be client can search Google and be made aware of his previous status. Something I believe you approve of through your open register system as proposed in the Maresfield Report.

I won’t dwell on your support for Maresfield report here but I will present a presumptive conclusion that you seem to be blinded by your own needs to create some sort of higher belief gospel on which to hang your selfish opposition to the HPC. To me the Maresfield Report presents no corroborative evidence, no references, no original research, is factually inaccurate and offensive to victims of therapy abuse. Most shockingly, since you are now Chair of the UKCP, it shows a complete ignorance of the UKCP’s role in the present self regulatory complaints process. In fact your seeming blind faith in this sub BA thesis masquerading as an official report throws up concerns about the very nature of your own ethical standards, research practises and ongoing professional development. What exactly do you hope to achieve or hide by venerating this tosh?

As Chair of the UKCP you now have a fantastic opportunity to show that you and your associates can really get to grips with the perception that you are only interested in self protection when it comes to complaints from the public. Sitting in your inbox at the moment is the outstanding complaints case of your associate Peter Berry. Peter Berry’s relationships with his clients have been described Peter Berry’s practise has been described as “ characterised by constant self-aggrandizing and seductive disclosures, frequent fits of uncontrolled rage and obscenely worded demands to immediately begin a sexual relationship”. Of course you know of Peter Berry’s present position because he is the former chair of the Guild of Psychotherapists and his replacement, Paul Atkinson, nominated you for position of Chair of the UKCP. Representations concerning the UKCP’s failings in the Berry case have already been made to the Parliamentary debate on the future of psychotherapy and Anne Milton MP has chastised the UKCP through David Pink for their failings to deal with the matter effectively. The issue in this case seems to be the same as it was in the Gale case. You and your colleagues seem incapable of accepting and understanding your duty of care. The UKCP complaints process and the confused and convoluted complaints process you envisage in the Maresfield Report has been constructed to allow the accused, their associates and friends to protect their own interests over those of the complainant or the public. The other problem of course is that you operate in secret, something again your gospel according to Maresfield clearly states you wish to continue. It is therefore impossible for any independent arbitrator to know exactly what you and your associates get up to when you have a complainant alone facing a panel of your cronies behind closed doors. Unlike the open and public hearings of the HPC you don’t even produce transcripts. However we do know from a source close to the Berry case that although the Guild of Psychotherapist ethics panel substantiated the complaints against Berry and were seriously concerned and shocked about Berry’s way of practising all they did was issue him with a warning letter. They did not suspend him, strike him off nor in any way publicly admonish him even though he refused to admit his way of practicing was in any way flawed. They did the equivalent of sending him home with a letter to his mum! Now the complainant, who clearly has a better understanding of the UKCP’s role in the complaints process than the compilers of the Maresfield report, has turned to the UKCP appeals process for a judgement on the Guild’s outcome and to (hopefully) issue public sanction against Berry. What have UKCP done for that complainant? Nothing. For almost two years they have sat on the case and done absolutely nothing. So here you have yet another case of a close associate found to be acting in a way that we will politely call “inappropriate”. Will you once again opt for protection of your colleagues over protection of the public? Is this the kind of cosy set up that you really fear losing to the HPC?

You and some of your close friends in the ACPASR, like fellow Gale apologists Professor Brian Thorne and Dr John Rowan, along with Peter Berry, seem to believe that your psychotherapy cannot be judged by anyone other than yourselves. You do not even seem to accept that psychotherapy is about helping the clients at all. You appear to wrap the clients’ needs up into the requirement to undergo some sort of spiritual journey. A spiritual journey on which you (of course) will be their (paid) guide. Do you understand how this can be very confusing for the public? A confusion that may well be compounded by the claims on your website that you are in fact NOT a psychotherapist if that is what the HPC defines you as being yet you still refer to yourself as being one. You are no doubt aware of the power of these types of double binds on vulnerable minds when used by the unscrupulous like Gale to control and manipulate people into unnecessary very long periods of very expensive “therapy”. The public can be very confused by the differentiations in modalities between a psychotherapist or counsellor who will give them a very limited focus on objective goals to sort their lives out like a CBT counsellor and someone else who calls themselves a psychotherapist but leads them on some sort of infinite ill defined quasi religious journey with no perceptible objective other than some sort of greater self awareness through a dictated lifestyle and emptier pocket.
Surely this sort of confusion of titles is exactly what the HPC are well placed to sort out. Why don’t you have the guts to just stop calling yourself a psychotherapist now instead of waiting for the inevitable HPC regulation? If you had confidence in your modalities and spiritualities you surely would not need to be associated with mere psychotherapy as defined by the HPC with its soon to be acquired rules, regulations, expectations and laws would you? Surely you and your friends would be happy to ply your unencumbered, untested, un-researched trade out there with the Tarot Card readers, psychics and other quasi religious spiritualistic cults. Why don’t you swear allegiance to Maresfield, put up your brass plate and start calling in the vulnerable, misguided and true believers. You would then be back where you seem so desperate to be again. Back in the heyday of the psychotherapy free for all. Back in the free wheeling, free love theatre commune days of Aquarius, when gurus and cult leaders were respected as deities instead of being exposed as charlatans. Do you know, I don’t think there is any ethical code, law, rule or regulation that prevents Tarot Card readers from having sex with their students or clients? So you never know you may find your true calling out there in a place without boundaries where you are not encumbered by rules and HPC enforced laws.

Professor Samuels, please leave real psychotherapy alone. Please let those who do not see a clients’ cry for help as a lifestyle choice, those who want to help people with trauma and real distress in their lives, get on and practise under the protection of the law they have earned in the same way that Arts therapists and psychologists now do.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Regards
Howard Martin.

Apologies to Howard and those who moaned at me. Here's the open letter to Andrew Samuels without the messy links.

Open Letter to Professor Andrew Samuels on the occasion of his election to the chair of the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP).

5th December 2009.

Dear Professor Samuels,

Congratulations on your achievement in being elected as chair of the UKCP. They now have the leadership they so richly deserve.

I have no doubt that ever since you started your career as the leader of a commune style theatre group way back in the 70s you have considered yourself to be a charismatic leader who, despite having constructed an enviable reputation for yourself, has quite possibly always felt that the power and recognition you deserve has been kept from you by the machinations of others. The UKCP were so moribund and in such a state of implosion that they were forced to restructure their constitution to allow an open vote for the position of Chair. This allowed your single issue policies of conflict with the HPC to strike a chord with those who have grown very fat and complacent exploiting the unregulated free for all that is the current state of psychotherapy. Even UKCP CEO David Pink indentified on the UKCP website that the voting was flawed and controversial; “The campaigning period has seen heated disputation and dissatisfaction with the election process”. So as if Wolfy Smith had been catapulted in as Prime Minister through electoral reform befuddlement you have now been thrown from the metaphorical backstreet pub of Tooting right into the spotlight of national politics and government policy on psychotherapy. Your street brawling agitprop style and paranoid rants will now quite legitimately be weighed in balance against the personal actions, ethical standards and manifesto proposals of you, your friends, associates and colleagues.

There is a presumption that you and your friends and colleagues in the Alliance For Counselling and Psychotherapy Against State Regulation (ACPASR) [www.allianceforcandp.org] will now exploit the half arsed UKCP constitutional changes to start your putsch on the UKCP. In a recent letter from David Pink (UKCP CEO) I was assured that the UKCP did not support your policy of title change to avoid regulation nor did they support “principled non compliance” with the law. While I am sure David Pink is already clearing his desk can you too personally give the same assurance or will you now just bludgeon the UKCP into acceptance of your potentially criminal intentions? I have no doubt the UKCP will now disappear even further to the lunatic fringes and be indistinguishably merged with the aims and objectives of the ACPASR with its attendant requirement that the membership swear allegiance to the discredited gospel that you call the Maresfield Report?

In your manifesto (see andrewsamuels.co.uk) you come across, in my opinion, as a person who is full of anger and vitriol against a system run by the HPC that you have taken no time to understand. Your personal attacks and open threats against Marc Seale as CEO of the HPC and his staff not only depict you as a vicious bully but also seem to represent an anger that does not stem from any justifiable doubts about the HPC but from a deep seated fear of loss of your power over your peers, clients and students. Do you really fear the HPC or do you fear any authority that will hold you to account realistically and legally for your actions?

It is widely known that one of your key complaints against the HPC is (to quote your website) “The standards being proposed for the HPC registration are scandalously low. Almost anyone will be able to be registered.” This is a very admirable stance to set very high standards for those who call themselves psychotherapists." Some would also admire you for your willingness to hypocritically ignore this position when it came to protecting the interests of your friend the discredited psychotherapy cult leader Derek Gale who was struck off by the HPC, UKCP and AHPP in June of this year. In fact your involvement in the Gale case also seems to directly undermine your position that the HPC are ineffective in protecting the public, because despite the best efforts of you and your colleagues that is exactly what they did.

I am sure you need no reminding of your submissions to the HPC / Derek Gale interim suspension hearing in December 2007. As you know Derek Gale is another charismatic figure who started out in hippy theatre communes from which you share a common heritage and cultural root. However, unlike yourself Gale has absolutely no qualifications whatsoever in psychotherapy. No doctorates, no professorships, no university references, not even a city and guilds in carpentry (though he has likened himself to Jesus on more than one occasion) but Gale was warmly welcomed into your circle of friends and colleagues because he ran a vanity book publishing company that published thesis and psychobabble books with scant (if any) authoritive peer review or moderation. From this he learned to parrot therapy buzzwords and phrases which obviously impressed not only his clients but also you. Gale openly called himself a psychotherapy guru and it was common knowledge among your associates that he ran his “therapy community” as a cult like family with himself referred to as the father. At the time of your public support for Gale he was suspended by the HPC, UKCP and AHPP pending investigations into alleged sexual abuse of vulnerable clients, physical violence against clients, financial exploitation of clients and untold number of breaches of professional boundaries most of which have subsequently been found to be true by the HPC. You seemed very keen to help Gale to legitimately carry on abusing. In fact although you didn’t attend the hearing you were so keen to help your friend off the hook with the HPC that you made yourself available on the phone in support of your submissions to the HPC on his behalf. As Gale was also suspended by the UKCP, who you were then a media spokesperson for, was it your intention that getting Gale off the hook at the HPC would also get him off the hook at the UKCP? It certainly seems so since you failed to declare any conflicts of interest in your relationships with Gale and the UKCP. Is it not fair to say that if you had your way Gale would have easily exploited your public endorsement of his cult like practise to carry on his abusive behaviour under your supervision? Luckily the HPC panel was not made up of your and Gale’s associates and they were sufficiently independent and technically skilled enough to not fall for your solicitations. Gale’s public suspension was upheld until he was finally struck off. From my experience of dealing with the AHPP and UKCP I am pretty confident that if you had made the same submissions to any of the self regulation bodies with a panel made up of your colleagues it is pretty much a forgone conclusion that Gale would have been allowed off of his suspension. This of course raises the question; is your anger at the HPC informed by your experience of having your authority undermined by them in the Gale case? Did the HPC humiliate you in front of your peers? Was your inability to help your friend a warning bell that the end was near for the cosy client blaming disciplinary set up that you so desperately want to maintain through adherence to the Maresfield Report?


Contrary your claims that striking off by the HPC is ineffective because an errant therapist can change title (in the same way as you have openly encouraged and stated that you intend to do if HPC regulation goes through) to avoid regulation and carry on practising, Gale has been publically admonished and openly ostracised to such an extent that he is now rumoured to be resorting to taking his practise to South America. Thus the obligation for HPC / UK public protection is fulfilled in extremis. However unless he also changes his name any would be client can search Google and be made aware of his previous status. Something I believe you approve of through your open register system as proposed in the Maresfield Report.


I won’t dwell on your support for Maresfield report here but I will present a presumptive conclusion that you seem to be blinded by your own needs to create some sort of higher belief gospel on which to hang your selfish opposition to the HPC. To me the Maresfield Report presents no corroborative evidence, no references, no original research, is factually inaccurate and offensive to victims of therapy abuse. Most shockingly, since you are now Chair of the UKCP, it shows a complete ignorance of the UKCP’s role in the present self regulatory complaints process. In fact your seeming blind faith in this sub BA thesis masquerading as an official report throws up concerns about the very nature of your own ethical standards, research practises and ongoing professional development. What exactly do you hope to achieve or hide by venerating this tosh?

As Chair of the UKCP you now have a fantastic opportunity to show that you and your associates can really get to grips with the perception that you are only interested in self protection when it comes to complaints from the public. Sitting in your inbox at the moment is the outstanding complaints case of your associate Peter Berry. Peter Berry’s relationships with his clients have been described has as “ characterised by constant self-aggrandizing and seductive disclosures, frequent fits of uncontrolled rage and obscenely worded demands to immediately begin a sexual relationship”. Of course you know of Peter Berry’s present position because he is the former chair of the Guild of Psychotherapists and his replacement, Paul Atkinson, nominated you for position of Chair of the UKCP. Representations concerning the UKCP’s failings in the Berry case have already been made to the Parliamentary debate on the future of psychotherapy and Anne Milton MP has chastised the UKCP through David Pink for their failings to deal with the matter effectively. The issue in this case seems to be the same as it was in the Gale case. You and your colleagues seem incapable of accepting and understanding your duty of care. The UKCP complaints process and the confused and convoluted complaints process you envisage in the Maresfield Report has been constructed to allow the accused, their associates and friends to protect their own interests over those of the complainant or the public. The other problem of course is that you operate in secret, something again your gospel according to Maresfield clearly states you wish to continue. It is therefore impossible for any independent arbitrator to know exactly what you and your associates get up to when you have a complainant alone facing a panel of your cronies behind closed doors. Unlike the open and public hearings of the HPC you don’t even produce transcripts. However we do know from a source close to the Berry case that although the Guild of Psychotherapist ethics panel substantiated the complaints against Berry and were seriously concerned and shocked about Berry’s way of practising all they did was issue him with a warning letter. They did not suspend him, strike him off nor in any way publicly admonish him even though he refused to admit his way of practicing was in any way flawed. They did the equivalent of sending him home with a letter to his mum! Now the complainant, who clearly has a better understanding of the UKCP’s role in the complaints process than the compilers of the Maresfield report, has turned to the UKCP appeals process for a judgement on the Guild’s outcome and to (hopefully) issue public sanction against Berry. What have UKCP done for that complainant? Nothing. For almost two years they have sat on the case and done absolutely nothing. So here you have yet another case of a close associate found to be acting in a way that we will politely call “inappropriate”. Will you once again opt for protection of your colleagues over protection of the public? Is this the kind of cosy set up that you really fear losing to the HPC?

You and some of your close friends in the ACPASR, like fellow Gale apologists Professor Brian Thorne and Dr John Rowan, along with Peter Berry, seem to believe that your psychotherapy cannot be judged by anyone other than yourselves. You do not even seem to accept that psychotherapy is about helping the clients at all. You appear to wrap the clients’ needs up into the requirement to undergo some sort of spiritual journey. A spiritual journey on which you (of course) will be their (paid) guide. Do you understand how this can be very confusing for the public? A confusion that may well be compounded by the claims on your website that you are in fact NOT a psychotherapist if that is what the HPC defines you as being yet you still refer to yourself as being one. You are no doubt aware of the power of these types of double binds on vulnerable minds when used by the unscrupulous like Gale to control and manipulate people into unnecessary very long periods of very expensive “therapy”. The public can be very confused by the differentiations in modalities between a psychotherapist or counsellor who will give them a very limited focus on objective goals to sort their lives out like a CBT counsellor and someone else who calls themselves a psychotherapist but leads them on some sort of infinite ill defined quasi religious journey with no perceptible objective other than some sort of greater self awareness through a dictated lifestyle and emptier pocket.

Surely this sort of confusion of titles is exactly what the HPC are well placed to sort out. Why don’t you have the guts to just stop calling yourself a psychotherapist now instead of waiting for the inevitable HPC regulation? If you had confidence in your modalities and spiritualities you surely would not need to be associated with mere psychotherapy as defined by the HPC with its soon to be acquired rules, regulations, expectations and laws would you? Surely you and your friends would be happy to ply your unencumbered, untested, un-researched trade out there with the Tarot Card readers, psychics and other quasi religious spiritualistic cults. Why don’t you swear allegiance to Maresfield, put up your brass plate and start calling in the vulnerable, misguided and true believers. You would then be back where you seem so desperate to be again. Back in the heyday of the psychotherapy free for all. Back in the free wheeling, free love theatre commune days of Aquarius, when gurus and cult leaders were respected as deities instead of being exposed as charlatans. Do you know, I don’t think there is any ethical code, law, rule or regulation that prevents Tarot Card readers from having sex with their students or clients? So you never know you may find your true calling out there in a place without boundaries where you are not encumbered by rules and HPC enforced laws and where you can take money without informed consent and shag who you like.

Professor Samuels, please leave real psychotherapy alone. Please let those who do not see a clients’ cry for help as a lifestyle choice, those who want to help people with trauma and real distress in their lives, get on and practise under the protection of the law they have earned in the same way that Arts therapists and psychologists now do.
Thank you for your time and consideration.

Regards

Howard Martin.

Thanks for this.

I've been featuring news and opinions abou this issue on my blog for some time. Since Howard's letter mentions the Maresfield Report that Andrew Samuels and co put so much faith in, here's a couple of critiques that I've made of it:

[www.mentalnurse.org.uk]

[www.mentalnurse.org.uk]


Their press release called it a "devastating critique" of the case for bringing in state regulation of psychotherapy in the UK. Personally I'd call it an embarrassingly badly-written pile of tosh.

What struck me as particularly shocking was where they were critiquing the draft standards of competence that they'll have to abide by when they come under the Health Professions Council. One of the draft standards will be that psychotherapists must ‘understand their duty of care with regard to the legislation on safeguarding children, young people and vulnerable adults’.

Sounds sensible enough to me, right? but here's the Maresfield Report's response:

Quote

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)

As someone who works with child and vulnerable adults, I'd consider this a pretty shocking gaffe. When it comes to issues of child protection or protection of vulnerable adults (POVA), 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.

If I (or anyone else in healthcare, teaching, social work etc) expressed those views in work, I'd expect to be called into supervision to ask serious questions about my safety to practice. If a student wrote it in an essay, they'd be failed on the spot. If a candidate said it in a job interview, it would absolutely guarantee they wouldn't be offered the job.

But this statement, which basically says, "We don't understand our child protection/POVA responsibilities" was signed off by ten psychotherapy organisations. Unbelievable.