I would draw attention to the objectives of BACP printed on the inside front cover of Therapy Today, in particular that BACP aims to ‘represent counselling at national and international level’. I note that only in the first objective is psychotherapy referred to, and I wish to take issue with the way BACP defines psychotherapists and simultaneously fails to represent its members.

As part of the process for protecting the professional titles of counselling and psychotherapy, practitioners were surveyed as to how they define themselves. The results, as published by UKCP but not by BACP, were that: generally people who described themselves as counsellors were educated to undergraduate diploma level and mostly employed in organisations; whilst those who describe themselves as psychotherapists are generally educated to masters level and are mostly self-employed in private practice. This finding is reflected in the proposed Standards of Proficiency (SoPs) where counselling is identified at level 5 and psychotherapy at level 7.

I wish to draw several points from these statements of fact. Firstly, words in common usage are defined by their usage, and people do use the words counselling and psychotherapy to identify a difference. In my case, one of those differences is the training, basically twice as much; twice as many training hours, twice as many client hours, twice as much personal therapy, and I hugely resent BACP declaring that all that amounts to ‘no difference’.

In issues of race, disability and sexuality, counsellors and psychotherapists consider it an ethical issue, and a courtesy, to accept the definitions and language that groups give themselves, but in this case BACP seeks to define people unilaterally. Further, in terms of ‘usage’ of the names, BACP also identifies that some of its members have joint membership of UKCP, so at least some BACP members do not have the qualifications to register with UKCP and those that do find value in the designation ‘psychotherapist’.

Second, BACP says there is no research that differentiates the two activities, and there is: the survey produced evidence, but BACP seems to have joined in the game of only accepting research that fits its preconceptions. Accepting the research and the common usage, BACP’s use of ‘majority’ would have to be applied, to be consistent with all the instances where a statement from a minority member is swept aside, and this use of ‘majority’ has been applied in the SoPs. The majority of counsellors meet the criteria for level 5 and the majority of psychotherapists meet the criteria for level 7, so there is a difference. Both the stance that there is no difference and the stance that they are completely different are flawed.

There are two areas with a wide overlap at present. To argue that, because there is no clear-cut line of demarcation between those who call themselves counsellors and those who call themselves psychotherapists, they must equate to the same thing, is an inadequate description of the situation, and therefore is untrue, a misrepresentation. To seek to separate them is proving problematic too.

And that brings me to representation, or rather lack of it. BACP is required to represent its members. The journal is full of well-argued articles and letters from its members with practical, philosophical and ethical objections to the processes we, as individuals and as a body, are being subjected to. Many individuals are suffering injustices under these processes, and BACP regularly answers with ‘the majority of our members’ as a justification to discount the concerns, views and difficulties of a significant portion of its members, leaving those members without representation in these processes and crucial debates at national level.

BACP represents its policies as our views and thereby presents more as a political party than a member-representative organisation. UKCP has found it possible to present a more complete picture, the majority view, and minority views, and BACP needs to do the same if it intends to meet the objective to represent its members at national and international level.

Peter Flowerdew