I read with great interest Sally Aldridge’s article on HPC regulation in the May edition of Therapy Today, which laid out very concisely the concerns of the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy and BACP’s response to them. Whilst overall I thought this was a reasonably fair and balanced response I feel I must take issue with one point, which for me goes to the heart of the debate. Under the section ‘Managing risk’, and in response to the Alliance’s concerns that the ‘initiative to regulate psychotherapy and counselling is itself a symptom of our tick-box society’, there appears to be no attempt to address this fundamental point. Instead there is what appears to be a rather bland acknowledgement that ‘we do seem to live in an anxious culture where risk management and risk avoidance have a high priority’. The response then goes on to state: ‘Statutory regulation is one of the mechanisms by which society seeks to manage this anxiety.’

Although this last sentence in undoubtedly true, surely this does not justify statutory regulation. In fact, surely this is the fundamental problem with statutory regulation – it has very little to do with safeguarding the interests of clients, and a lot more to do with managing social angst and avoiding risk. And in the process individuals become disempowered and infantilised, and it is left to the state and its agencies to decide what is good for them and how they should be ‘protected’.

This seems to be the complete antithesis of the ethos of psychotherapy and counselling, which is to empower individuals and encourage them to make their own choices, rather than being passive victims who have to be protected. 

This is in no way to condone bad and/or unethical practice but taking away individual responsibility and freedom of choice in the name of ‘safety’ is not the way to address such issues. To quote the Alliance again: ‘In many ways, psychotherapy and counselling inherently expose this illusion [the belief that everything can be brought under control]; they support us in tolerating uncertainty, difference, risk and the unknown.’