People are up in arms over the Professional Liaison Group’s (PLG) draft consultation 
on the standards of proficiency for counsellors and psychotherapists. In this issue we present a range of responses to the proposed differentiation of the titles counsellor and psychotherapist. We talk to service managers and practitioners about how, if the proposals go ahead, these changes might impact the profession in different settings from the NHS to university counselling services to EAPs.

What services would call themselves under the new legislation is the least of their problems. How would the processes 
of referrals and assessments be affected? 
One service manager regards as ‘impossible and ridiculous’ the suggestion that only those trained and registered as psychotherapists could work with more disturbed clients. Others anticipate confusion not only for practitioners but more worryingly for the public who have come to accept the concept 
of counselling but for whom psychotherapy might signify something different, more associated with the medical model.

We have a large postbag on the same subject. Paul McGahey writes: ‘Many therapists know that at the level of practice there are 
no meaningful differences between psychotherapy and counselling... any attempt to separate them will be arbitrary and contrived... political and economic manoeuvring.’ But others welcome the proposals, arguing that although there is a big middle ground shared between counselling and psychotherapy, there are extremes that 
are very different: counsellors, for example, are not diagnosticians, having no legal basis 
to provide a mental health diagnosis. 
(Do psychotherapists in fact have such a legal basis or licence, I find myself wondering, 
and if so what does this look like?)

The main concern expressed in readers’ letters, however, is not with the specific standards of proficiency but with the draft consultation as a whole. Practitioners will 
not recognise themselves or their work from this document. The profession is being forced to fit into a paradigm that is completely wrong – the regulatory structures of the HPC.