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Kevin Jones
Fit to practice? Teaching art psychotherapy under state regulation.
This paper suggests ways in which future state regulation might affect training in counselling and psychotherapy. It situates ‘fitness to practice’ in relation to the marketization and regulation of higher education and the public sector. It describes how state regulation influences the teaching of theory and practice on the MA Art Psychotherapy at Goldsmiths. The effects of HPC regulation are also influenced by the universities Quality Assurance Agency, the drive towards education geared toward ‘’Skills for Industry’’ and in the NHS, providing training linked to government policy regarding Skills for Health, Increased Access to Psychological Therapies and ‘Evidence Based Practice’. These agendas combine to increase bureaucracy and intensify the micromanagement of a workload focused on regulatory procedures. As this model is internalised by practitioners, students and clients are increasingly related to as consumers of goods and services. For trainings in counselling and psychotherapy, the character ‘fit to practice’ will be a character fit to practice relationships of exchange in the neo-liberal market place.
Paul Verhaeghe
“Fitness to practice”: if they don’t make you happy, sue them.
The idea of the state regulators to regulate and control psy-practitioners is problematic for at least two reasons. First of all, a psychotherapeutic manualized treatment based on a protocol like approach is doomed to fail. A genuine psychotherapy is to a large extent unpredictable and what is “good” for one client can be very bad for another. This implies that it is impossible to measure the “good behavior” of a practitioner. Secondly, and even more importantly, the failure of such a manualized “good behavior” approach will dovetail with a certain conviction shared by many clients. The contemporary discourse tells people that their problems are caused by things (other people, genes) outside them, meaning that they can’t do anything about it and that a solution has to come from an almighty Other. When they discover a) that the therapist fails in this respect and b) that an organization provides them with the opportunity to put a complaint if the therapist doesn’t make them happy, a number of them will be all too happy to use this outlet. My prediction is that this organization will be submerged by mostly irrelevant complaints and that patients with a genuine complaint will almost never present one.