Open letter from person-centred community calls on BACP to halt the SCoPEd project

An open letter from hundreds of person-centred practitioners and supporters of the Person-Centred Approach has been published, calling on BACP to halt the controversial SCoPEd project for counselling and psychotherapy and to ‘open a more inclusive dialogue about the future of the field’.

The letter (reproduced in full below and also sent to UKCP, BPC and NCS) is signed by over 400 therapists, academics, educators and trainees, among them BACP Fellows, BACP Accredited and Senior Accredited members , UKCP registered therapists, NCS members and leading person-centred writers from the UK, Europe and the United States. 21 organisations have also signed, including person-centred groups from across Europe.

As the letter spells out, the project and its proposed competency framework is ‘divisive, elitist and exclusionary’ and marginalises Person-Centred Therapy, one of the most widely practised therapeutic approaches among BACP members. As the letter states:

‘SCoPEd distorts our professional landscape into a politically expedient shape at the expense of a whole swathe of practitioners whose work is misunderstood, downgraded and delegitimised.’

Read the letter and full list of signatories below.

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SCoPEd: Insufficient and Incongruent

An open letter to BACP

As Person-Centred therapists and supporters of the Person-Centred Approach, we have become increasingly concerned about the development of the SCoPEd project for counselling and psychotherapy. Person-Centred Therapy (PCT) constitutes one of the most widely practised approaches within BACP and yet SCoPEd has marginalised and excluded Person-Centred therapists almost entirely. After the first consultation, we were assured that PCT – an approach supported by decades of research (e.g. Cooper, Watson & Hölldampf, 2010; Elliott et al, 2013; Murphy & Joseph, 2016) – would be more accurately represented in the second iteration of the proposed framework, but in fact little of any substance has changed and there has been no willingness to fundamentally reassess the project’s approach. We now call on BACP to halt SCoPEd and to open a more inclusive dialogue about the future of our field.

Person-Centred therapists are committed to creating the therapeutic conditions for constructive change and the fulfilment of potential, not only with individual clients and trainees but for the therapy field as a whole. How, then, can we best nurture the diverse ecology of therapeutic practice in the UK? This is an important and complex question that the SCoPEd project fails to answer successfully by attempting to ‘map’ training and practice onto a simplistic ‘competency framework’. For us, this signals a failure of imagination and a lack of creativity, but it also demonstrates a troubling commitment to a predetermined outcome.

Far from creating the conditions for growth, the project has proven to be divisive, elitist and exclusionary, not least by privileging some theories, practices and professional identities over others, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the complex histories and professional politics that feed its erroneously hierarchical understanding of therapy training and practice. SCoPEd creates a professional self-concept that is incongruent with how many practitioners, trainees and clients actually experience the human relationships at the heart of therapy, irrespective of theoretical orientation.

This is not solely about our own interests as Person-Centred therapists. The marginalisation of the Person-Centred Approach in the SCoPEd project is an exemplary case study in how – whatever its intentions – the proposed framework fails to accurately promote, represent or clarify understanding in the field of counselling and psychotherapy in the UK. Rather than ‘mapping’ the territory, SCoPEd distorts our professional landscape into a politically expedient shape at the expense of a whole swathe of practitioners whose work is misunderstood, downgraded and delegitimised.

From a Person-Centred perspective, we are particularly concerned about the following issues:

1) It is a key Person-Centred value that no one group is better equipped to be a therapist than any other. Counselling and psychotherapy is already a disproportionately white, middle class profession but SCoPEd looks set to further entrench these deep structural inequalities by lending even more status to certain titles and trainings at the expense of others. This will inevitably drive up costs, exacerbate elitism and further exclude from the upper tiers of the framework’s hierarchy those experiencing socio-economic disadvantage, discrimination and oppression.

2) Until very recently, well into the project’s development and in our view far too late, the three SCoPEd membership bodies – BACP, UKCP and a relatively small body dedicated solely to psychoanalytic practice (BPC) – have excluded all other membership organisations, interest groups and stakeholders.

3) The composition of the so-called Expert Reference Group (ERG) is deeply problematic. Originally, the ERG had seven psychoanalytic therapists and no Person-Centred therapists. Then an eighth psychoanalytic therapist was added, together with one identifying as Person-Centred/Pluralistic. The ‘independent’ Chair is drawn from the British Psychoanalytic Council. This is not a grouping that can be expected to understand or faithfully represent the complexities and nuances of the family of Person-Centred and Experiential therapies.

4) SCoPEd uncritically adopts the notion that the best way forward for our field is to develop a ‘competency framework’ using a methodology designed originally to manualise CBT for the IAPT project in the NHS (Roth & Pilling, 2008). The Person-Centred Approach has long critiqued manualisation, which potentially dehumanises the co-created, relational art of therapy and, in this case, risks reducing it to a mechanistic, psychoanalytically-informed healthcare intervention.

5) The Roth & Pilling methodology relies on a narrow and self-referential range of ‘evidence’, which distorts the outcomes of its ‘research’ so that assumptions from psychoanalytic psychotherapy become in the SCoPEd framework ‘evidence-based’ assertions about the relative competency of therapists with different trainings and philosophies (Murphy, 2019).

6) Given the theoretical bias in the ERG’s composition and the values inherent in the project’s chosen methodology, it is no surprise that the competence framework itself almost erases a Person-Centred understanding of therapeutic practice. For example:

I. Despite the temporary and somewhat disingenuous removal of practitioner titles in the second iteration, SCoPEd clearly differentiates ‘counselling’ and ‘psychotherapy’, terms which in the Person-Centred Approach are used interchangeably. Indeed, from Carl Rogers’ earliest writings onwards, differentiation has tended to be viewed critically (Rogers, 1942; Thorne, 1999). Until very recently this was also BACP’s position but the organisation has now performed an astonishing and unevidenced U-turn on the issue.

II. Moreover, the framework portrays ‘psychotherapists’ as being not just different but more competent than ‘counsellors’ across a whole range of practice issues, formalising a divisive hierarchy of practice that devalues post-qualification experience and training. It also grants ownership of the language to those who support this hierarchical differentiation and delegitimises those, such as Person-Centred therapists, for whom these terms have different meanings. Proposing (as yet unspecified) ‘gateways’ between the titles does nothing to level this inequality – if anything it highlights how therapists have been organised into an imposed system of tiered enclosures, through which only those with sufficient resources will be able to move upwards.

III. PCT in the UK is commonly – though by no means exclusively – practised under the title of ‘counsellor’, which the hierarchy effectively downgrades. But the professional and political history of this identity (see Rogers, 2019) has nothing to do with the competence or ability of Person-Centred therapists to co-create and sustain therapeutic relationships at depth (e.g. Mearns & Cooper, 2017).

IV. Throughout the framework, a psychoanalytically-informed, instrumental treatment approach – one at least partly located in the medical model – is positioned as superior to holistic, phenomenological, Humanistic approaches. The highest level (‘psychotherapist’/ column C) competences are skewed towards psychoanalytic theory and practice, most obviously in their references to the ‘unconscious’. The addition of the phrase ‘out of awareness’ and other minor language tweaks do not go anywhere near far enough to redress this inequality.

V. The privileging of psychoanalytic approaches belies the claim that the SCoPEd framework is ‘evidence-based’. There is no clear evidence that psychoanalytic approaches achieve higher levels of competence, greater depth of practice or have better ‘outcomes’ for clients than Person-Centred therapies, which are well researched and strongly evidence-based (e.g. Cooper, Watson & Hölldampf, 2010; Elliott et al, 2013; Murphy & Joseph, 2016).

VI. Using UKCP and BPC-approved course curricula as the primary sources for the ‘psychotherapist’/column C competences devalues the alternative – but nonetheless philosophically coherent – approach found in Person-Centred training, which has different emphases, e.g. the value placed on group work (not just individual therapy) in personal development. There is, after all, no evidence that higher academic levels of study, more personal therapy, attending mental health placements and working from a psychoanalytic theoretical base in training result in more meaningful therapy experiences for clients.

VII. The related notion, visible in the SCoPEd competences, that only practitioners who meet the ‘psychotherapist’/column C criteria are able to undertake the most complex therapeutic work, is contradicted by the fact that many trainee and newly qualified counsellors (from all theoretical approaches) will already be working ethically in placements with issues such as complex trauma. It also ignores the pioneering work of Person-Centred practitioners both in psychiatric settings (e.g. Prouty, 2008; Warner 2014) and in the area of ‘post-traumatic growth’ (Joseph, 2011).

Summary

We cannot support SCoPEd because it imposes an understanding of therapy that we do not share and for which there is a lack of good evidence. The project’s organisational processes and research methodology have created a framework that erroneously equates practitioner competency and therapeutic depth with specific theoretical approaches, training conventions, practitioner titles and organisational memberships/levels – all of which evolved for professional reasons that have little bearing on the richly diverse, lived experience of therapeutic relationships.

In its legitimising of redundant hierarchies, SCoPEd misrepresents the profession of counselling and psychotherapy, fails the Person-Centred Approach, devalues the work of thousands of trained counsellors in the UK and risks further impeding diversity in our field.

We ask BACP to halt the project; to reconnect with its own membership; to consult more widely across the field about the best way forward; to fully embrace diversity of thought and practice; to genuinely prize the work of therapists of all kinds; and to put therapeutic values rather than political expediency back at the heart of its approach.

^References

^{Cooper, M; Watson, JC; Hölldampf, D (2010) Person-Centered And Experiential Therapies Work: A Review Of The Research On Counseling, Psychotherapy And Related Practices. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.}

^{Elliott, R., Watson, J., Greenberg, L.S., Timulak, L., & Freire, E. (2013). ‘Research on humanistic-experiential psychotherapies’. In M.J. Lambert (Ed.), Bergin & Garfield‘s Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change (6th ed.) (pp. 495-538). New York: Wiley.}

^{Joseph, S (2011) What Doesn’t Kill Us: The new psychology of post-traumatic growth. New York: Basic Books.}

^{Joseph, S (2017) ‘The Problem of Choosing Between Irreconcilable Theoretical Orientations: Comment on Melchert (2016)’ American Psychologist 2017, Vol. 72, No. 4, 397–398.}

^{Mearns, D & Cooper, M (2017) Working at Relational Depth in Counselling and Psychotherapy. 2nd edition. London: Sage.}

^{Murphy, D (2019) ‘The Questionable Evidence Base of SCoPEd’. Blog retrieved 26/09/2020 here: https://allianceblogs.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/the-questionable-evidence-base-of-scoped/}

^{Murphy, D, & Joseph, S (2016) ‘Person-centered therapy: Past, present, and future orientations’. In D. J. Cain, K. Keenan, & S. Rubin (Eds.), Humanistic Psychotherapies: Handbook of Research and Practice, Second Edition (pp. 185 – 219). Washington: APA.}

^{Prouty G (2008) Emerging Developments In Pre-Therapy: A Pre-Therapy Reader. Monmouth: PCCS Books.}

^{Rogers, A (2019) ‘Maps, Languages & Lost Continents: Person-Centred Therapy And The SCoPEd Project’. Blog retrieved 26/09/2020 here: https://allianceblogs.wordpress.com/2019/07/31/maps-person-centred-therapy-scoped/}

^{Rogers, C (1942) Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer Concepts in Practice (p. 4). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.}

^{Roth, AD & Pilling, S (2008). ‘Using an evidence based methodology to identify the competences required to deliver effective cognitive and behavioural therapy for depression and anxiety disorders.’ Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 36, pp. 129-147.}

^{Thorne, B (1999) ‘Psychotherapy and counselling are indistinguishable’ (pp. 225-232) in Feltham, C. Controversies in Psychotherapy and Counselling. London: Sage.}

^{Warner, M (2014) ‘Client processes at the difficult edge’. In P Pearce and L Sommerbeck (eds), Person-Centred Practice at the Difficult Edge. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.}

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Organisational signatories

The Person-Centred Association (TPCA)

UK Person-Centred Experiential (UKPCE)

Person-Centred Therapy Scotland (PCT Scotland)

The Association for the Development of the Person-Centered Approach (ADPCA)

European Network for Person-Centred & Experiential Psychotherapy and Counselling (PCE Europe)

Counsellors Together UK (CTUK)

Psychotherapy & Counselling Union (PCU)

Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility (PCSR)

Pink Therapy

Aashna Counselling & Psychotherapy

Free Psychotherapy Network (FPN)

Alliance for Counselling & Psychotherapy

Counselling for Social Change

Kaleidoscope Counselling Scotland

Radical Dialogues

Dutch Association for Person-Centred Experiential Psychotherapy (VPeP)

Flemish Association for Client-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapy and Counseling (VVCEPC)

Panhellenic Association of Person-Centred & Experiential Professionals (PEEPVIP)

Polish Society of Integrative Experiential Psychotherapy (INTRA)

Rogers Centre – Foundation for the Autonomous Person (Hungary)

Romanian Association for Person-Centred Psychotherapy (ARPCP)

Russian Community of the Person-Centred Approach (RCPCA)

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Individual signatories

Ray M. Adomaitis Ph.D; Licensed Psychologist, Washington
Sabine Ahlen MBACP Registered; NCS Accredited
Laura Aitken MBACP (Accred)
Maria Albertson, Founder, Counsellors Together UK (CTUK)
Ashley Allcorn A.M., LSW; B Temaner-Brodley PG Fellow, CCA, Chicago
Lee Allen MBACP Registered
Vicki Allen MBACP Registered
Jacqueline Anderiesz-Tyrrell MBACP (Accred); BA (Hons)
Lisa Andrews A.M., LCSW; B Temaner-Brodley PG Fellow, CCA, Chicago
Dan Angel MBACP Registered; NCS Accredited
Paul Atkinson, Free Psychotherapy Network
Jax Ayling MBACP (Senior Accred)
Richard Bagnall-Oakeley UKCP & BACP Registered
Julia Bailey MBACP (Accred)
Williamina Baillie MBACP Registered
Sarah Baimbridge MBACP (Accred)
Charles Baines MBACP (Accred)
Helene Baker MBACP Registered, NCS (Acc)
David Ballantine MBACP Registered
Sal Bannister MBACP (Accred), NCS (Acc); counsellor/psychotherapist
Keith Barber UKCP Registered
Jennifer Barlow MBACP (Accred)
Eleanor Barnes MBACP (Accred), MCOSCA
Larry Barnett MBACP Registered; BSc (Hons), FdSc
Alison Barr MBACP Registered; Director, The Green Rooms
Diz Barton MBE MBACP (Senior Accred); UKCP Registered
Jay Beichman Ph.D; MBACP (Senior Accred)
Alaina Bercilla CCA Intern, Eastern Michigan University
Paul Berry MBACP Registered
Kris Black MBACP/UKCP Registered, ISN, IAP, LLB (Hons); Founder, Radical Dialogues
Martyn Blair MBACP Registered
Jon Blend UKCP Registered
David Blowers UKCP Registered
Dr Peter Blundell, Senior Lecturer, Liverpool John Moores University
Gloria Boadi MBACP (Accred), NCS Accredited
Arthur Bohart Ph.D; Santa Clara University, California
Mihaela Bonațiu, Chair, ARPCP
Margaret Borszcz MBACP (Accred)
Mae Boyd MBACP (Accred)
Heather Grace Bond Ph.D
Carla Boulton NCS member
Anne-Marie Bradley MBACP (Accred)
Fr. William Bradley, St. Joseph’s Mission, Stafford Springs, CT, USA
Yasmina Bradshaw BACP student member
Ben Brett MBACP Registered, Dip.Couns
Alan Brice MBACP (Senior Accred)
Rita Brophy MBACP Registered; Integrative Counsellor
Helen Brown, student counsellor, University of Warwick
Jane Brown MBACP Registered
Daniel Bruck MBPsS, University Sao Francisco, Brazil
Chris Bulpitt ACC Accredited
Terry Butler MBACP Registered
Beatriz Cadavid MBACP Registered
Sarah Callen DipCo., MSc.; Co-Editor, Person-Centred Quarterly
Rose Cameron MBACP (Senior Accred)
Caroline Capon NCS member
Isabel Carballal CPCAP L4 Therapeutic Counselling Dip
Jenny Carlisle MBACP (Senior Accred)
Lorna Carrick MBACP (Senior Accred); Counselling Programme Director, University of Strathclyde
Ian Carty
Nancy Cerritelli BACP student member
Sally Chisholm, Lecturer, Supervisor & Counsellor, Keele University, Metanoia Institute
Agapitos Chrysochoos, PCA counsellor
Celia Clark NCS Accredited
Dot Clark MBACP Registered
Becki Clitsome, Student Member BACP & NCS
Dilys Codrington NCS Member; Psychotherapeutic Counsellor
Peter Coffey MChem (hons), MRes
Jo Cohen, Assoc. for the Development of the Person-Centered Approach
Susan Coldwell MBACP (Accred)
Sophie Coleman
Paul Colley, therapist & supervisor; conscientious membership body objector since 1994
Kim Cooper MBACP (Accred)
Sandra Cooper MBACP Registered counsellor; BA (Hons)
Dr Elizabeth Cotton, Surviving Work
Tom Cowan, Student Member BACP
Geoff T. Cox MBACP (Accred); MA
Mary Coyne UKCP Registered; person-centred psychotherapist
Andrew Cranham UKCP Registered
Daniela Crasan ARPCP
Stephen Crowther MBACP Registered
Christine Cullen MBACP Registered
Leigh-Anne Cummings-Flint
Alisha Cunningham NCS student member
Maria Mirella D’Ippolito, psychologist & psychotherapist, Rome, Italy
Amy Dann NCS Accredited
Catherine Date MBACP Registered
Jayne D. Davidson MBACP (Accred)
Dominic Davies, CEO Pink Therapy; Fellow of NCS and NCP, former Fellow of BACP
Jennifer Davies MBACP & UKCP Registered
Kim Davies MBACP Registered
Maria Davies MBACP Registered
Rebecca Davies nee Howes MBACP Registered
Samantha Davies NCS Accredited
Ryan Dawes MBACP Registered; Mphil, PGDip
Veronica Day MBACP Registered
Mathias Dekeyser
Glenna Demeter NCS Fellow Accredited member
Trees Depoorter, Chair, VVCEPC
Helen Ditchburn BACP student member
Melody Dixon-Oliver MBACP Registered
Lesley Dougan, Senior Lecturer/MA Course Lead, Liverpool John Moores University
Magda Draskoczy, Person-Centred therapist and trainer, Hungary
Sam Driscoll MBACP Registered
Ashleigh Dunford-Bishop MBACP Registered
Charles Durning MBACP Registered
Rachel Dyer-Williams MBACP Registered
Cheryl Edwards MBACP Regsitered, NCS member
Erin Ekeberg A.M., LSW; B Temaner-Brodley PG Fellow, CCA, Chicago
Roisin Elder MBACP Registered; PGDip
Derryn Ellingham MBACP Registered
Ivan Ellingham Ph.D, CPsychol (Counselling & Clinical Psychology), HCPC
Clayton Elliott MBACP (Accred)
Beth Evans UKCP Registered
Claire Fewster NCS Accredited
Melanie Fieldhouse MBACP Registered; PGDip
Christine J. Finch NCS Accredited
John Fletcher MBACP (Accred), UKCP Registered
Palada Florentina ARPCP
Jane Flotte A.M., LCSW; B Temaner-Brodley PG Fellow, CCA, Chicago
Florenta Foca ARPCP
Leeanne Fowler UKCP Registered; NHS counsellor & university lecturer
Heidi Francis Ad Prof Dip PC, MNCS Accred
Peter Freeman MBACP Registered
Pamela Frith MBACP Registered
Sally-Anne Fuller BACP member
Dr Anna Louise Fry Ph.D, MNCS Accredited
Samantha Fulton MBACP Registered
Stavroulla Gabriel MBACP Registered
Jamie Geary
Sharon Gibbons, formerly MBACP Registered, now NCS
Donna Gibson MBACP Registered
Marc Gibson NCS Accredited
Alexandre F. Gieseke MBACP (CYP); Graduated Basis for Chartered Psychologist – GBC – MBPSs
Lizzie Gilbert MBACP Registered
Nick Glenister MBACP Registered
Trish Golding MBACP (Accred)
Jojo Gosney MBACP (Accred); MA
Natalee Goodman BACP student member
Keith Grayson MBACP Registered
Sue Griffiths MBACP (Accred)
Monica Gundrum, psychotherapist, Belgium
Dr Ellen Gunst Ph.D, psychologist and psychotherapist, Belgium
Rob Hack BACP student member
Jules Haley, Person-Centred counsellor
Sonia Hall MBACP Registered
Deborah Hare NCS Accredited Member
Caroline Harland MBACP Registered
Elizabeth Harris MBACP (Senior Accred)
Richard Harris MBACP Registered
Steven Harris MBACP Registered
Dr Jeff Harrison, Senior Lecturer, Liverpool John Moores University
Mark Harrison NCS member (ex-BACP, departed in response to SCoPEd)
Dr Andrew Hart CPsychol, Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society (AFBPsS)
Colin Hartland MBACP Registered
Michelle Harwood MBACP Registered
Jan Hawkins MBACP (Senior Accred)
Catherine Hayes MBACP (Senior Accred); Assistant Professor in counselling
Lee Healbury
Sebastian Heid MBACP Registered; trustee, the Person-Centred Association (TPCA)
Paula Hendricks MBACP Registered
Suzy Henry, Chair of the Person-Centred Association (TPCA)
Arne Heylen, Client-Centred therapist, Catholic University Louvain, Belgium
Amanda Hignett BACP student member
Antonia Higgins MBACP Registered
Michelle Higgins MBACP (Accred)
Jo Hilton, Clinical Fellow, University of Edinburgh
Kerrie Hipgrave MBACP Registered
João Hipólito, Professor, Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, Portugal
Cara Hitchcock MBACP Registered
Brennan Holt MBACP Registered
Jacqueline Homonko MBACP (Accred)
Darren Hopgood MBACP Registered & NCS Accredited
Kirsty Horne NCS member
Sophie Horrox MBACP (Accred)
Angela Hotchkiss, Person-Centred counsellor
Richard House Ph.D, Chartered Psychologist, former Senior Lecturer in counselling & psychotherapy
Bernard Howell MBACP Registered
Lin Hudson MBACP (Accred)
Gillian Hughson NCS member
Kathy Humberstone MBACP (Accred); Senior Lecturer, University of Derby
Lee Humphreys BACP student member
Jane Hupston MBACP Registered & NCS
Fiona Hutchings MBACP (Accred)
Lynne Hutton MBACP Registered
Darren Jackson
Gillian James MBACP Registered
Marie Jefsioutine MBACP Registered
Marlene Jenas MBACP Registered
Julie Jenner UKAHPP, UKCP and EABP registered
Julia Jenkins MBACP Registered
Dr Peter Jewel, Person-Centred counsellor and supervisor
William Johnston MBACP Registered
Shirley Jolley Retired Person-Centred counsellor, TPCA
Ruth Jones MBACP (Accred)
Stephen Joseph Ph.D, Professor of Psychology, Health & Social Care, University of Nottingham
Kay Juviler-Bacon MBACP (Accred)
Ewa Kaczorkiewicz, Psychotherapist & Psychologist, Warsaw, Poland
Edwin Kahn, ADPCA
Ali Keen MBACP Registered
Dawn Keenan, trainee counsellor, Liverpool John Moores University
Susan Kelly MBACP Registered
Emma Keir MBACP (Accred); CMCOSCA
Josephine Kerr MBACP Registered
Howard Kirschenbaum, Professor Emeritus, University of Rochester; biographer of Carl Rogers
Grace Klein, ADPCA
Julia Kohnert MBACP Registered
Lisa Kmita MA; Prog. Leader, University Campus North Lincolnshire
Judy Knight MBACP Registered
Farah Kurdi-Villate CCA Intern, University of Chicago
Nicolas Krivine
Lynne Lacock MBACP Registered; Senior Lecturer
Colin Lago BACP Fellow; M.Ed, D.Litt
Adam Laidler MBACP Registered; psychotherapist
Leonore Langner, Chair, PCE Europe
Janey Lansdell MBACP Registered, NCS member
Emma Largesse MBACP Registered
Richard Lasson, Social Worker, Mental Health Support
Barbara Leach Former MBACP (Senior Accred), now retired
Maggie Leathley MBACP Registered; BSc MA PGDip
Rev Dr Jeff Leonardi, counsellor, supervisor, Honorary Research Fellow
Sonica Li, American Counseling Association (ACA), ADPCA
Germain Lietaer, Emeritus Professor, Catholic University Leuven, Division of Clinical Psychology
Jacqui Light NCS member
Mary Lim MBACP Registered
Francesca Lo Verso MBACP Registered
Georgia Looker, level 4 PCT Counselling student
Corrina Lord MBACP (Accred)
Kate Loughran MBACP Registered
Ruth Lyne MBACP (Accred)
Suzi Mackenzie MBACP (Senior Accred)
Colin Mackillop MBACP Registered
Vickey Maddrell, postgraduate student, LJMU
Angela Madeley NCS member
Lisa Major NCS student member; trainee on MA
Barbara Malinen, psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer
Bogumila Malinowska MBACP (Accred)
Lorna Marchant BACP Fellow
Laurel Marks MBACP Registered counsellor
Vivien Marsh MBACP (Accred)
Mary Martin MBACP Registered
Fiona McAlister MBACP Registered
Ali McBride MBACP (Accred)
Jennifer McCann UKCP Registered psychotherapeutic counsellor
Lorna McCarthy MBACP (Senior Accred)
Karon McCarthy-Sadd
Kate McGarry MBACP Registered; PCT Scotland
Elizabeth H. McGauley Sarfaty M.Ed
Susan McGinnis MBACP Registered
Alan McNeill MBACP (Accred), PGDip Couns; NHS primary care counsellor
William Mendez
Beatrice Miller, Chair, PCSR; Person-Centred Therapist
Tina Miller MA; sociologist, social worker, and family life educator
Katie Miller-Cole MBACP Registered; PCU member
Graeme Mills MBACP (Accred)
Catherine Mitchell MBACP Registered
Joanna Mockfrord, Person-Centred Experiential trainee
Mihaela Momoiu MSc; UKCP Registered psychotherapist
Kathryn A. Moon, Licensed Counselor, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Judy Moore Ph.D, MBACP (Senior Accred); former Director, Centre for Counselling Studies, UEA
Dr Shirley Moore BACP individual member
Hilary Moors MBACP Registered
Trish Morgan BACP student member
Kerry Morris MBACP Registered
Rosswitha Morrison MBACP Registered
Kate Morrissey MBACP Registered
Mike Moss MBACP Registered
Vicky Mould NCS (Prof Accred)
John Moulder A.M., LSW; B Temaner-Brodley PG Fellow, CCA, Chicago
Danusia Mulligan MBACP Registered & NCS Accredited
Alison Munro MBACP Registered
Dr David Murphy, Associate Professor, University of Nottingham
Anne Murphy MBACP (Accred)
Claire Murray MBACP Registered
Travis Musich CCA Intern, Illinois School of Prof. Psychology, National Louis University
J. L. Myatt MSc, MBACP Registered
Lynn Naidoo MBACP Registered
Wendy Neil, Person-Centered Counsellor, MNCS, BA (Hons), MSc, DIC
Anna Nelson-Smith MBACP Registered
Paula Newman MBACP (Senior Accred) counsellor and supervisor
Georgeta Niculescu ARPCP
Sally Nilsson, Human Givens Practitioner
Len Northfield MBACP Registered; MSc, PGDip
Stacy Nye MBACP Registered
Donna O’Connor MBACP Registered; psychotherapeutic counsellor
Charlotte O’Hanlon BACP student member
Jeremy O’Sullivan MBACP (Accred)
Sarah Oak MBACP (Accred); member of MK Rogerian Group
Todd Odell M.A.; Senior Therapist, Chicago Counseling Associates (CCA)
Stephen Ong, Person-Centred therapist
Gemma Owen MBACP Registered
Lynn Palethorpe MBACP Registered
Joana Pancada MBACP Registered; MA
Nicola Parry BACP student member
Ian Parker, in solidarity, President, College of Psychoanalysts – UK
Geraldine Pass MBACP Registered
Saf Patel MBACP Registered
Fiona Paterson MBACP Registered
Lorna Patterson MBACP (Accred)
Rachael Peacock, MUCKP Person-Centred Psychotherapist
Sally Pendreigh MBACP (Senior Accred); Person-Centred counsellor
Natali Petkova MBACP Registered
Sarah Pettifer MBACP Registered; therapist and trainer
Gabriella Philippou, Person-Centred Chamber, Pancyprian Association for Psychotherapists (PAP)
Mary Phoenix MBACP (Accred)
Susan Pildes, Senior Trainer, Chicago Counseling Associates (CCA)
Lisa Pinder MBACP Registered; psychotherapist & counsellor
Caroline Plummer MBACP Registered
Maggie Pollard MBACP (Senior Accred)
Chip Ponsford
Martin Poole, trainee therapist
Denis Postle ARCA, Independent Practitioners Network (IPN)
Kevin Powell MBACP Registered
Karen Prescod MBACP Registered
Sue Price NCS member
Dr Gillian Proctor, Lecturer, University of Leeds, and independent clinical psychologist
Steph Quinn MBACP Registered
Rob Radcliffe MBACP Registered
Heather Rai PG Student, University of Nottingham
Pretish Raja UKCP Registered; co-founder, Aashna Counselling & Psychotherapy
Suzi Rankin
Catarina M. Rato MBACP (Senior Accred)
Lyn Rhodes MBACP (Senior Accred)
Anne Richards MBACP Registered
Antonia Richardson MBACP Registered; MUKCP
Helen Richardson MBACP (Accred)
Kathleen Richardson, diploma student
Ruth Richardson MBACP Registered
Nicola Richter MA; MBACP (Senior Accredited), UKCP Registered, MBPsS, Fellow of HEA
Lindsay Riley MBACP Registered
Alison Rimmell MBACP (Accred)
Cashel Riordan MBACP (Accred)
Anne Robertson MBACP Registered
Cy Rodger MBACP Registered
Andy Rogers MBACP Registered; PGDip; therapist, supervisor & author
Blue Roth LCSW; Staff supervisor & therapist, Chicago Counseling Associates (CCA)
Kaye Rowe MBACP Registered
Andy Rushton UKCP Registered
Peter Ryan MBACP (Accred)
Professor Andrew Samuels, former Chair, UKCP
Pete Sanders, author, retired counsellor, supervisor and trainer
Hamilton Sargent MBACP Registered
Martin Sawers, Humanistic & Integrative Psychotherapist (UKCP), IAPT Counsellor
James Schindler-Ord MBACP Registered; BSc
Jane Schindler-Ord MBACP Registered
Carolyn Schneider A.M., LCPC; Director, Chicago Counseling Associates
Julia Scott MBACP Registered; NCS Accredited
Trodi-Ann Scott BACP student member
Becky Seale MBACP (Senior Accred)
Judith Seddon MBACP (Accred); RGN
Tracy Sedgeworth MBACP Registered
Alberto S. Segrera, Emeritus Professor, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico
Daniela Ploesteanu Sfirlea ARPCP
Radha Shah MBACP Registered
Mike Shallcross MBACP Registered
Rosemin Shariff MBACP (Accred)
Sandra Sharman MBACP Registered
Kath Shaw MBACP & UKCP Registered
Hannah Shepherd NCS Accredited
Katie Ship MBACP Registered, FdA
Jessica Shipman, ADPCA
Lynne Short MBACP (Accred), Counsellor/Psychotherapist
Lois Sidney, formerly MBACP Registered
Molnár L. Simon, Rogers Centre – Foundation for the Autonomous Person (Hungary)
Helen Skelton UKCP Registered
Al Skiffington-Smith MSc; UKCP Accredited Psychotherapist
Pete Smallwood MBACP (Accred)
Audrey E. Smith MBACP (Accred) Counsellor/Psychotherapist
Deb Smith MBACP Registered
Elizabeth Smith MBACP (Senior Accred)
Katherine Smith MBACP Registered
Liz Smith MBACP Registered; NCS Accredited
Leona Smith-Kerr MBACP Registered
Wendy Snell MBACP Registered
Sarah Sollis MA
Lisbeth Sommerbeck, Danish psychologist and author
Bill Stanley, Director, Merulae Limited
Amy Star MBACP Registered
Geri Stein MBACP Registered
Susan Stephen MBACP (Accred)
Anna Sternberg MBACP (Accred)
Ian Stockridge MBACP Registered
Duncan Stoddart MBACP (Senior Accred)
Helen Storey UKCP Registered; MSc
Julia Stretton MBACP (Accred)
Kate Stubbings MBACP (Senior Accred)
Joseph Suart, College of Psychoanalysts, Free Psychotherapy Network, PCU
Amanda Sugarman MBACP Registered
Árpi Süle, Editor-in-Chief, Dutch Journal of PCE Psychotherapies of the Netherlands & Belgium
Tim Sumner, student member BACP; Level 4 Counselling Course
Heather Swan MBACP Registered
Julie Taylor
Rachel Teare MBACP (Accred); Counsellor and Psychotherapist
Victoria Telfer-Smith MBACP Registered
Veda Tester MBACP Registered; BSc (hons)
Claire Thomas MBACP (Accred)
Peter Thomas MBACP Registered
Alison Thorne MBACP (Senior Accred)
Gloria Tirelli MBACP Registered
Janet Tolan BACP Fellow; NCS (Senior Accred)
Jo Tomlinson, Lecturer in counselling; MA Comm. Psych.
Siobhan Toner MBACP Registered
Agnes Banatine Toth, Person-Centred counsellor, Hungary
Ian Townshend MA; Retired Senior Lecturer, UCLan
Henri Treece NCS member
Melanie Holland Tucker MBACP Registered
Allan Turner MBACP (Senior Accred)
Bridget Tyson-Carr MBACP Registered
Elizabeth Urie MBACP (Accred)
Debbie Vallance MBACP Registered
Dr Kathleen Vandenberghe, Senior Lecturer, Liverpool John Moores University
Daniel Vanyi, Person-Centred counsellor, Hungary
Christine Vinnicombe MBACP Registered; integrative counsellor
Alan Mark Walker MS, LMFT, Texas
Jenny Watkins UKCP Registered Person-Centred psychotherapist; MSc
Catherine Watson MBACP (Accred)
Natasha Wellfare NCS Accredited
Chris Wels MBACP (Accred); Counsellor and Psychotherapist
Neil Weston MBACP Registered
Graham Westwell MSc; Senior Lecturer, Edge Hill University
Louis White NCS member
Andy Whitehouse, Dip. in Person-Centred Counselling & Psychotherapy
Jacqui Whittingham MBACP Registered
Melanie Whyatt MBACP Registered
Heather Whyte MBACP Registered
Cathrin Wildwood MBACP Registered
Heidi Wilke MBACP Registered
Dr Paul Wilkins Ph.D (Psychotherapy)
Paula J. Williams MSc, Fellow of NCS
Liz Willows MBACP Registered
David Wilson MBACP Registered
Marge Witty Ph.D, Professor Emeritus, Illinois School of Professional Psychology, Argosy Uni, Chicago
Judy Wright MBACP Registered
Julie Wright MBACP Registered
Jin Wu Psy.D; ADPCA; licensed clinical psychologist, Illinois, USA
Rae Yates NCS Accredited
Mei Liou Zarnitsyna, CCA Intern, Loyola University, Chicago
Alicja Zwiercan MA in PCE Counselling & Psychotherapy, University of Nottingham

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Maps, Languages & Lost Continents: Person-Centred Therapy and the SCoPEd Project

Andy Rogers takes at look at the telling absence of the Person-Centred Approach in the development of the SCoPEd project.

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There is so much to say about SCoPEd that it can be hard to know where to start. Fortunately, many elements of the project – the motivation, methodology, evidence-base, hierarchical structure, consultation process, conflicts of interest and so on – have been closely examined elsewhere, particularly on blogs and social media. So here I want to home in on a few core issues for person-centred practitioners.

Person-Centred Therapy (PCT) has been a major force in the UK therapy landscape since the 1980s. Leading practitioners were influential in the development of counselling services in education and contributed much to the growth of counselling training and professional organisations. The book Person-Centred Counselling in Action (Mearns & Thorne, 1988) is still a core text on many counselling courses and remains one of the UK’s best-selling counselling titles of all time.

Note that already I am referring to ‘counselling’ rather than ‘psychotherapy’. This is important for the SCoPEd project because its draft ‘competency framework’ explicitly differentiates ‘counsellors’ and ‘psychotherapists’, albeit with a third intermediate category labelled ‘advanced qualified/accredited/psychotherapeutic counsellor’. This differentiation, which the largest professional body involved, the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP), had argued previously there was no evidence for, has come in for much criticism; mostly – but not exclusively – from counsellors whose work has been downgraded, with newly qualified psychotherapists defined in the framework as more competent across a range of practice areas.

Inconvenient histories

Before I get side-tracked into the many overlapping issues here – not least around the organisational politics that feed this project – let’s just step back into the world of the person-centred therapist.

In PCT, there is not, and never has been, any meaningful differentiation between counselling and psychotherapy. A contemporary practitioner might be attuned to how others use these terms in a differentiating way and to the tendency for trainings with these labels to meet the differing requirements for professional organisations that cater mostly for either ‘counsellors’ or ‘psychotherapists’. They might also note wryly the way this division operates in the field of employment, with differences in pay, fees, context, status and so on. As Thorne (1999) writes, we need to ‘face the unpalatable truth that the business ethic is all-pervasive… In such a marketplace it is not politic to affirm that counselling and psychotherapy are indistinguishable’ (pp.229-230). Yet, in terms of the therapy itself, i.e. what happens between practitioner and client, there is no substantive case for differentiation within person-centred working.

In the academic literature, the tendency is to refer simply to ‘Person-Centred Therapy’ or to use the terms ‘counselling’ and ‘psychotherapy’ interchangeably. I was going to reference some texts here to illustrate the point but it makes more sense to throw out a challenge: find me a book or paper that articulates the difference between person-centred counselling and person-centred psychotherapy. If any exist, they will still be contradicted by almost all the other person-centred literature.

Much of the contemporary person-centred attitude to these terms has evolved from the position of the approach’s originator, Carl Rogers, who clearly viewed PCT as a form of psychotherapy (just browse his book titles), yet made no distinction between ‘psychotherapy’ and ‘counselling’. As far back as 1942, Rogers was using the terms interchangeably, writing that, ‘intensive and successful counseling [sic] is indistinguishable from intensive and successful psychotherapy’ (Rogers, 1942, p.4, my emphasis). Poignantly for the current debates, the general use of ‘counselling’ for the work of therapy also has its roots in Rogers’s life and work. As a clinical psychologist with no medical training, he made a tactical switch to ‘counselling’ in the mid-1950s in Chicago, when legally the practice of psychotherapy required medical qualifications.

Whatever the pragmatic motivations at the time, it is important to note that the person-centred approach was already becoming a direct challenge to the hegemony of the medical model (and would continue to be so, with increasing vigour and depth), so the switch also made sense politically and philosophically. Clearly, 1950s Chicago is a world away from the UK in 2019, but it is interesting how relevant this moment remains, how the terms continue to have a political potency: are contested, subject to claims of ownership and find themselves jostled into a status hierarchy that serves the interests of those who already have more power in the field by bolstering their portrayal of superior legitimacy, skill, depth or competence.

And there is another more recent historical nugget to unearth here too, which is that PCT’s association in the UK with ‘counselling’ rather than ‘psychotherapy’ could easily have gone the other way. In the early 1980s, as the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) developed in parallel with the BAC (then without the ‘P’ for psychotherapy), the person-centred approach had not yet established national organisational representation. So, as Mearns & Thorne (2000) write, there was,

‘no institutional process by which the approach could be involved with the developing professionalisation of psychotherapy/counselling. The result was that the work of engaging with professional organisations was left very much up to individuals, […] person-centred specialists [who] made the pragmatic choice of investing their time in BAC.’ (p.26)

Importantly, the decision not to go with UKCP was not made because PCT failed to qualify as ‘psychotherapy’. In fact, ‘it was only small matters of difference which inspired this choice’ (ibid.), mainly around personal therapy requirements and the approach’s potential positioning within UKCP’s humanistic section.

This alignment with BAC(P) would inevitably lead to an association with ‘counselling’ rather than with ‘psychotherapy’, so it is intriguing to wonder about how the field would have looked had PCT found its professional home within UKCP instead. Who knows how the approach – and indeed UKCP – would have evolved? But the SCoPEd project washes its hands of these inconvenient histories and their attendant complexity and illuminating angles.

Undoubtedly times have changed but PCT has never reneged on its philosophical, political and practical position in relation to ‘counselling’ and ‘psychotherapy’. As one of its leading thinkers in the UK has argued, the case for differentiation – inseparable as it is from professional politics – demands close scrutiny:

‘there is no essential difference between the activities currently labelled “counselling” and “psychotherapy”… [T]o suggest that there is is the result of any one or a permutation of the following: muddled thinking; a refusal to accept research evidence; a failure to listen to clients’ experiences; a lust for status; needless competitiveness; power mongering; a desire for financial gain; or some other unworthy motive prompted by professional protectionism.’ (Thorne, 1999, p.225)

Maps and missing territories

The fact that one of the most established therapeutic traditions in the UK has a lot to say on these matters – not only differentiation but manualisation and professionalisation generally – has been of such little interest to the SCoPEd project that there was no PCT representation on the teams tasked with developing the framework. Even the humanistic modalities more broadly were grossly underrepresented in the Expert Reference and Technical Groups, which were dominated by psychoanalytic practitioners. Statements from BACP following the outcry amongst members about this blatant bias have made small admissions that they got some of the language wrong and were endeavouring to recruit new people to better balance the team.

But how can this have been so overlooked at the outset? What does it say about a project which wants to ‘map’ the world of counselling and psychotherapy that it would erase a whole continent of thought and practice and then, when the inhabitants are outraged, desperately try to patch things up with reassurances that they are ‘listening’ and want to get it right?

What does it say about a project which wants to ‘map’ the world of counselling and psychotherapy that it would erase a whole continent of thought and practice?

Why has the person-centred approach been ignored in this way? Perhaps part of the answer lies somewhere in the SCoPEd organisations’ uncritical embrace of a ‘competency framework’ methodology derived from UCL’s manualisation of CBT for the IAPT project (IAPT, 2007; Roth & Pilling, 2008). While these frameworks might have some uses, it is difficult to understand the perception of the supremacy of this specific method for resolving difficulties in the field and promoting the profession, unless you actually want to bulldoze nuance and erase complexity in order to ‘clarify’ things. But BACP especially seems heavily invested in this approach, having already used it to create frameworks for a range of practice areas (including, it should be said, an IAPT-compliant, manualised version of PCT). Indeed, the organisation is so attached to the Roth & Pilling methodology that in a statement in Therapy Today, the Chief Professional Standards Officer and Chair of the SCoPEd Technical Group, Fiona Ballantine Dykes, claimed that the alternative to developing the SCoPEd framework is ‘doing nothing’ (Therapy Today, May 2019, p.51).

Given this single-minded, blinkered commitment to the competency framework process, it is hard not to conclude that person-centred perspectives – with their critical takes on both the manualisation of therapy and the associated alignment with healthcare values and medicalisation – are simply too awkward, too inconvenient, too damned political. As if a project like SCoPEd could not be political! As if, in its much-trumpeted spirit of collaboration between competing organisations, it could magically transcend all the history, politics, power struggles and diversity of thought and practice in order to objectively ‘map the competences’ of ‘counsellors’ and ‘psychotherapists’, without in the process distorting the field to shoehorn it into such a simplistic hierarchical structure.

I am not suggesting a deliberate conspiracy here, more that a number of professional interests converge around the adoption of these frameworks, whose politically expedient effect – in the apparent coherence of their efficiently organised categories and columns – is to eliminate awkward truths, not least in the profession’s sales pitch to governments and the NHS.

From this perspective, the SCoPEd project is so full of holes that, in one sense, it is hardly there at all. Part of me wonders whether, for all the fanfare and controversy, it will end up – like so many other documents – parked on our hard-drives or floating in the digital cloud, read more than once by almost no one outside of the organisational players, ignored by most of the public, of little interest to potential clients, perhaps skim-read by other stakeholders in the mental health field and then… what?

Well, it is how these things linger on the edges of awareness that says something about their potential power, about how – once installed – their unspoken values seep almost unnoticed into all sorts of areas of our lives as therapists (practice, training, supervision, organisational procedures, government policy). In person-centred terms, they begin to form a hard-to-grasp but nonetheless influential set of conditions of worth for therapeutic practice, which further externalise our professional loci of evaluation.

This is particularly problematic for PCT because, as I wrote in my own submission to the BACP consultation, the draft SCoPEd framework is alarmingly ignorant of person-centred working. Some of the exclusively ‘psychotherapist’ competences, for example, are almost the bread and butter of person-centred therapeutic relationships, which in the real world are often engaged with under the banner of ‘counselling’. Check out 3.5.c:

Ability to negotiate issues of power and authority experienced in the inner and outer world of the client or patient as part of the therapeutic process.

As I say in my response, for person-centred counsellors this would be a central principle of everything they do. Yet ‘qualified counsellors’ are deemed only to have the:

Ability to recognise and understand issues of power and how these may affect the therapeutic relationship.(3.5)

They are perceptive but passive witnesses to issues of power, which for me edges into an unethical disavowal of both the potential impact of their role and the asymmetry of the therapeutic encounter.

Read on and we find that only trained ‘psychotherapists’ have acquired the:

Ability to evidence reflexivity, self-awareness and the therapeutic use of self to work at depth in the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic process.(5.1.c)

Which, again, is at the very heart of person-centred working (e.g. Mearns & Cooper, 2017). Yet ‘qualified counsellors’, we are led to believe, have only an:

Ability to demonstrate a commitment to personal development that includes self-awareness in relation to the client or patient to enhance therapeutic practice. (5.1)

Elsewhere, other competences make ‘psychotherapist’ the sole territory of those who lean heavily towards medical or psychoanalytic thinking, e.g. Ability to demonstrate the skills and critical awareness of unconscious process (3.10.b), which further alienates and excludes person-centred therapists.

Language barriers?

In response to the criticism attracted by the draft framework, BACP has suggested it will attempt to iron out some of these issues with language tweaks in future iterations, but such errors are extremely revealing of the way the unique theory and practice of PCT is invisible in the project, subsumed and submerged within generic statements around counselling practice while its more challenging perspectives have been redacted or just ignored into oblivion.

In any case, we should be wary of the reassurances from the SCoPEd teams that they just need to get the language right. For one thing, this smacks of PR rather than full engagement with the critiques (as in the infamous politician’s or corporate CEO’s defence, “I misspoke”). Furthermore, in this focus on language, BACP et al seem (wilfully?) to misunderstand the various challenges and objections, which are not only about words – as if swapping them with others would make it all better – but rather see language as the most obvious manifestation of deeper flaws in the project.

Something else I find troubling here is my own personal experience of having the same conversations with senior individuals at BACP about another competency framework, one drawn up for university and college counselling in 2016, which I had criticised as inappropriately redefining the sector as a branch of manualised healthcare (Rogers, 2019). In a face-to-face meeting and follow-up emails, it was acknowledged that BACP did not ‘get the language right’ and I was offered reassurances that this would be taken on board for future frameworks. Yet here we are again. I have no idea what the people I spoke with took away from our chat but somewhere in the subsequent organisational processes these reassurances evaporated into nothing and PCT once more finds itself ignored and excluded.

The person-centred approach, arguably, is not blameless in all this. Perhaps we have not been great at organising; perhaps we have felt so compelled to make concessions to the dominant narratives in ‘mental health’ and the therapy professions that we have our lost ourselves a little along the way, woozy with disorientation and gripped by a fear of judgement if we defy the trajectory of our own field. Nevertheless, the fact that a voice speaks with less assertiveness amid the noise of our culture’s deepening conversation with psychological distress is no excuse to ignore it, and it is troubling – and disturbingly ironic – when therapy organisations fall into this trap.

Perhaps my own tiny sketch of PCT’s political difficulties does it a disservice too. While I have drifted away from person-centred forums (journals, organisations, conferences etc.) over the years, social media – for all its flaws – has reminded me recently that there is a vibrant community of practitioners out there and PCT still has a unique and vital contribution to make to our field, to ‘mental health’ thinking generally and to our culture more widely. As ever, what the person-centred approach has to say is not always easy listening for those with professionalising aspirations and intentions, but surely it is our job as therapists to hear the things that others cannot bear, to listen to the most difficult truths, to welcome their complex, quietly spoken messages, to meet and fully engage with the challenges they present – why can’t our organisations do the same?

Tipping point

 As I researched the background to PCT’s early alignment with counselling and BACP (as discussed above), I stumbled across another passage in the same book (Mearns & Thorne, 2000) that, although written in my early days as a person-centred therapist twenty years ago, rings as true now as it did then:

‘It would be a tragedy… if person-centred therapists lost heart at this stage when, precisely because of some of the unfortunate moves towards a sterile professionalism… there is a greater thirst than ever among therapists and would-be clients for an engagement with what is truly human’ (p.218).

Whatever happens as SCoPEd ploughs on, we urgently need to find our voices. There are shifts in the mental health sector across disciplines and hierarchies. The medicalisation of distress, the dominance of biomedical psychiatry/pharmacology, the related mechanisation of therapy as another manualised treatment for discrete psychological ‘disorders’ and its subsequent co-option by the State in health and welfare policy are all coming under increasing pressure from a range of critical standpoints.

We may be at a tipping point. The more people experience this rigidly medicalised ideology in practice, the more they become aware of a need for something else and actively begin to seek it out. With IAPT’s legitimacy crumbling (Jackson & Rizq, 2019), the promises of psychopharmacology unfulfilled and psychiatric diagnosis itself falling further into disrepute, it is starting to look as if Person-Centred Therapy was on the right side of history all along.

Our professional organisations might want to listen more closely to what we have to say; not to assist their PR blitz around contentious projects, but to reset the course of the professions in ways that more authentically respect and promote the core values and diverse perspectives found in our field’s rich ecology of practitioners.

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Andy Rogers has been a BACP member and counselling service coordinator in further and higher education for 20 years. He also works in private practice in Basingstoke, Hampshire.

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References

IAPT (2007) The competences required to deliver effective cognitive and behavioural therapy for people with depression and with anxiety disorders. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/drupal/site_pals/sites/pals/files/migrated-files/Backround_CBT_document_-_Clinicians_version.pdf (accessed 05 July 2019).

Jackson, C & Rizq, R (2019) The Industrialisation of Care: Counselling, Psychotherapy and the Impact of IAPT. Monmouth: PCCS Books.

Mearns, D & Cooper, M (2017) Working at Relational Depth in Counselling and Psychotherapy. 2^nd edition. London: Sage.

Mearns, D & Thorne, B (1988/2013) Person-Centred Counselling in Action. London: Sage.

Mearns, D & Thorne, B (2000) Person-Centred Therapy Today. London: Sage.

Rogers, A (2019) ‘Staying Afloat: Hope & Despair in the Age of IAPT’ (pp. 142-155) in Jackson, C & Rizq, R (2019) The Industrialisation of Care: Counselling, Psychotherapy and the Impact of IAPT. Monmouth: PCCS Books.

Rogers, C (1942) Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer Concepts in Practice. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Roth, AD and Pilling, S (2008). ‘Using an evidence based methodology to identify the competences required to deliver effective cognitive and behavioural therapy for depression and anxiety disorders.’ Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 36, pp. 129-147.

Thorne, B (1999) ‘Psychotherapy and counselling are indistinguishable’ (pp. 225-232) in Feltham, C. (1999) Controversies in Psychotherapy and Counselling. London: Sage.

 

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Joint letter to BACP, UKCP and BPC on the SCoPEd consultation results

In response to the SCoPEd initial consultation results, a joint letter to BACP, UKCP and BPC has been signed by the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy, the National Counselling Society, Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union and the College of Psychoanalysts.

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Dear Chairs and Chief Executives of BACP, UKCP and BPC,

The Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy, the National Counselling Society, Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union and the College of Psychoanalysts have noted your claims hailing the results of the recent consultation.

We have analysed the available statistics, and, on behalf of our combined memberships of well over 2,000 practitioners, nearly all of whom register with yourselves, respectfully beg to differ.

The results are hardly a ringing endorsement of the SCoPEd project (dramatically so, as far as BACP is concerned).

The return rates are assuredly below acceptable minima for the adoption of such wholesale change in any profession. We calculate that there is an overall return rate of the survey of around 13 per cent (7,087 respondents out of 53,500 members) – or about one in eight.

BACP’s return rate appears to be 13 per cent (5,878 respondents out of 44,000 members. (If the smaller register were used then the return rate will have been higher.)

BPC’s return rate appears to be 15 per cent (230 respondents out of 1,500 members).

And UKCP’s return rate appears to be 12 per cent (979 respondents out of 8,000 members).

Our organisations consider that it would be foolhardy to attempt to make such fundamental changes to the structure of our professions on the basis of the level of response garnered up to now. Don’t forget, it is you yourselves who have asserted that the changes will be fundamental, not only your critics. We will continue proactively to oppose any such developments.

Nor do the more detailed statistics offer you anything like the succour that you have claimed. Drilling down, we find that:

60 per cent of respondents did not believe SCoPEd would improve things for clients.

46 per cent did not believe it would help recruitment.

39 per cent did not believe it would make things clearer for trainees.

46 per cent did not believe it would help professional organisations to promote therapy.

Given that the leaderships of the three organisations so strongly supported the direction of travel of the project, these figures should make for depressing reading for you.

And among BACP members, the positive responses were even lower. Only 36 per cent of BACP respondents to the survey believe SCoPEd will make things easier for clients trying to find the right help (Question 1a). This is just 2,131 members, which is about 5 per cent of BACP’s total membership.

For comparison and to get these returns into some kind of proportion, this is 1,000 less than those, mainly but not all BACP members, who signed the petition to scrap the project.

It also contrasts fairly dramatically with the 57 per cent of BPC and 56 per cent of UKCP respondents who believe the framework would be positive for clients – an intriguing difference that is reflected throughout all the results, as laid out here.

On the question of how useful SCoPEd will be for employers (Q1b), 50 per cent of BACP respondents answered that it will be easier to establish who to employ, whereas 78 per cent of BPC and 71 per cent of UKCP respondents agreed.

On the effect on clarity for students choosing training pathways (Q1c), 57 per cent of BACP respondents were positive, compared with 84 per cent of BPC and 78 per cent of UKCP. Similarly, 50 per cent of BACP members answering the survey believed SCoPEd would make promotion of members’ skills by professional organisations easier (Q1d), whereas 75 per cent (BPC) and 73 per cent (UKCP) felt the same.

What are we to make of this? Is it surprising that organisations representing those identifying more often as ‘psychotherapists’ (and in BPC’s case, exclusively psychoanalytic psychotherapists), rather than ‘counsellors’, would favour a framework that places psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the top of a hierarchy of practice? We also note with as little cynicism as we can manage the close ties these organisations have with training programmes that would profit from such an assertion or reassertion of superiority.

Despite the deeply problematic nature of the consultation methodology, as shown in this article, and the lack of any real endorsement of the project in the results – not to mention the widespread dissatisfaction with the framework (particularly amongst ‘counsellors’ and especially the under-represented person-centred/experiential/existential/humanistic communities), as well as the substantive critiques of the political agendas and claimed ‘evidence base’ of the project – despite all this, BACP, BPC and UKCP assert nonetheless that, ‘we have an early indication that we should progress this work’.

Surely, if anything, a dispassionate viewpoint would be that there is an ‘early indication’ that the entire project is deeply flawed, and is pursuing a path that a substantial portion of the field finds at best misguided, and at worst a complete betrayal of their practices. In what sense, then, can this work be said to be happening ‘alongside our memberships’?

To progress the SCoPEd framework anywhere near ethically, it would mean reappraising every single aspect of it: its motivations and intentions, its assumptions, its methodology, its form, the composition of its ‘expert reference group’, the ‘independent’ chair, the disputed ‘evidence base’, the nature of further consultations, and so on.

Is there any will at all to do this within BACP, BPC and UKCP? The leaderships of your organisations may ‘acknowledge’ the ‘strength of feeling’ in the debates around ScoPEd, but how can they possibly continue with the project in this form, knowing the numerous substantive critiques of the project and its current functioning?

Perhaps the 3,000 consultation comments, as yet not analysed by the ‘independent research company’, hold some of the answers. Is it possible that all of these comments and all other relevant data beyond what you have released thus could be published on one of your websites? We are serious about this and consider it to be normal good practice for a consultation. Not to do so, or to refuse to release the comments, will leave you open to allegations of cooking the books.

In the meantime, the organisations sending this letter would welcome open dialogue, above all in a public format, with BACP, BPC and UKCP about the future of the therapy field.

Collegial greetings from,

The Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy

Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility

The Psychotherapy and Counselling Union

The College of Psychoanalysts

The National Counselling Society

 

19 March 2019: post amended to add the National Counselling Society to the letter signatories.

 

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SCoPEd Consultation: Methodologically Challenged

Richard House Ph.D., former Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy, Counselling and Psychology at the University of Roehampton, subjects the SCoPEd framework consultation exercise to critical analysis.

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Introduction and Context

In this commentary I wish to deconstruct, and subject to critical analysis, the apparent methodology used by the psy sponsor organisations in their recent SCoPEd consultation process. In precipitating a process that could end up having major implications for the practice of many thousands of psy practitioners, organisations surely have a grave responsibility to ensure that, as far as possible, any research that is carried out is methodologically robust, and transparently fair and unbiased. In the case of the SCoPEd consultation, I will show below that this is, alas, very far from being the case – which, in turn, places substantial doubt on the reliability of the initial findings as recently announced.

A Fair Consultation?

The first observation to make about the consultation process is that the most important question of all wasn’t even posed – i.e. “Do you think that it is necessary and appropriate for the psy organisations to develop an explicit written framework for competent practice in the therapy field?”.

Rather, the need for a competency framework is merely asserted and assumed by “organisational fiat”, as a background given; and only then do respondents answer the questions posed, having already tacitly and implicitly agreed to the need for such a framework by the way the consultation has positioned them, and by the very act of them completing the consultation.

It should by no means be tacitly or casually assumed that everyone who completed the consultation necessarily agrees that such a framework is necessary; yet there is no mechanism within the consultation as implemented to discover this vital information. One has to ask whether this was an oversight, or a quite deliberate “positioning” by those conducting the process.

So one has to ask, further, why were members not asked, first and foremost, to give their view on whether a generic framework is necessary and appropriate? Although of course this has to be speculative, it might conceivably be because by doing this, it would then have been far more difficult to position members into accepting the principle of a framework per se without any debate. And as mentioned above, the very “democratic” act of completing the consultation can easily be read as giving tacit legitimacy to that which, at the outset, should have been open to discussion and possible refutation, rather than merely assumed as an uncontested datum.

Thus, a fair and proportionate consultation that was genuinely aiming to find out members’ views – as opposed to one merely seeking rubber-stamping legitimation for a pre-decided view – would have sent all potential respondents both the proposed framework and a document of equal length critiquing the need for a proposed framework. This would then have left members free to make up their own minds, “un-nudged”, with an accompanying, genuinely open-ended set of consultation questions.

As it is, a methodological “coach-and-horses” can be driven through this whole process, as anyone with any expertise in research methodology will know. (I can just imagine what a group of sharp, methodology-savvy Roehampton PsychD research students would have made of this! – and it wouldn’t have been pretty…)

It’s therefore extremely disappointing to this commentator, at least, that this consultation wasn’t far better informed methodologically. Moreover, this in turn is, at the very least, consistent with the suspicions of organisations like the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy that this is yet another choreographed, top-down power move by our field’s psy organisations, still intent on importing the dead hand of state regulation into our work.

An “Independent” Research Company?

We read in the rubric from the organisational sponsors of “[t]he consultation exercise, which was run by an independent research company on behalf of BACP, the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) and the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), … [and that] … More than 3,000 members and stakeholders submitted a comment as part of the consultation process. These are currently being analysed by the independent research company for the key themes, which will be published in the summer.” (my emphasis)

The phrase “was run by” needs to be carefully interrogated and unpacked. It is indeed potentially reassuring to be told that the research company “running” the consultation process was “independent”; but such cosy reassurance is of no substance unless respondents are told in detail what the term “running” actually means in practice. For example, to have any methodological confidence in the consultation’s reported findings, the public needs to know what written remit the “independent research company” was given by the sponsoring organisations prior to the consultation exercise. This is critical, because it needs to be totally transparent to what extent the research company is, indeed, genuinely “independent” – e.g. merely in the sense that they carried out the data-collecting exercise, or in the sense that they themselves decided on the questions to be asked in it, and how those questions were framed.

Moreover, regarding the analysis of the comments received, we also need to know what, if any, guidance was given to the “independent” company by the sponsoring organisations, in terms of how the company analyses and presents the qualitative findings. If this information is not completely transparent, respondents will have no way of knowing whether the presentation of the results is a fair and representative depiction of the actual feedback which respondents gave in their thousands.

The Questions Themselves

Regarding the actual questions posed in the consultation procedure: first, respondents were asked, “Q1a – How will the framework affect clients or patients being able to find the right kind of help to meet their needs?” (my italics).

First, note that the tell-tale word “will” is used here, rather than “would”. If this were a genuinely open-minded consultation that hadn’t already pre-decided the desired outcome, the word “will” would most certainly not have been used in this question. Rather, the hypothetical “would” should and would have been used.

This is by no means a minor, semantics-oriented issue – for the way these questions are worded will have a major impact in creating the background “mood-music” to ease the driving through of any required institutional agenda. Those composing the wording of these survey questions will have been well aware of this (and if the sponsoring organisations weren’t, for any reason, then any reputable “research company” worth its salt certainly would have been).

In my view, and strictly speaking, respondents who were expecting a fair and open consultation which was not already positioning them by the way the questions were posed should have refused to answer this question. A much fairer and objective wording for this question would have been something like the following:

“Q1a – Would a framework like the one suggested have any impact, negative or positive, on clients/patients being able to find the right kind of help to meet their needs; and if so, how?”.

The key point here is that such a question might well have yielded significantly different results from the question that was actually posed (on which, see below).

Indeed, all four consultation questions commit this elementary methodological error in using the weasel word “will”. So, in relation to question 1b, a fair, more objective wording would have been as follows:

“Q1b – Would a framework like the one suggested have any effect, negative or positive, on employers being able to establish which counsellors and psychotherapists to employ in their service; and if so, how?”

And for question 1c:

“Q1c – Would a framework like the one suggested have any effect, negative or positive, on trainees in their understanding of the pathways open to them for core training with adults; and if so, what and how?”

And finally for 1d:

“Q1d – Would a framework like the one suggested have any effect on professional bodies being able to promote the skills and services of their members; and if so, how?”

If the employed research company wished to test the reliability of the first reported consultation results, they could quite easily carry out a much smaller survey of practitioners who did not complete the first survey, using these alternatively worded questions. The results of such a survey would then provide clear evidence on the extent to which the original survey results are reliable and representative, or otherwise. Without doing such a follow-up, the reliability of the original survey results must remain in question.

Finally, regarding the raw presented statistical results, it’s clear that even when we ignore the multiple biasing effects of the way in which the whole consultation process was conducted (referred to in detail above), around 25 per cent of respondents – a considerable minority – were not happy with the proposed framework. If I were one of the psy organisations wishing to see this framework implemented, I certainly wouldn’t be feeling at all triumphant about these initial results.

In Conclusion

I have raised a number of core methodological issues in this commentary, and I ask the sponsoring organisations to reply to the concerns I have raised here in adequate detail.

If there is no full response, the silence will be deafening, and the many thousands of concerned practitioners will no doubt reach their own conclusions.

 

Dr Richard House, C.Psychol., AFBPsS, Cert.Couns.

Former Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy, Counselling and Psychology, University of Roehampton; former PsychD research supervisor; former counsellor and psychotherapist in General Practice (1990–2007); author of Therapy Beyond Modernity (2003) and co-editor (with Del Loewenthal) of Against and For CBT (2008).

richardahouse@hotmail.com

 

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SCoPEd: Butchering Psychopractice

Denis Postle (ARCA; Independent Practitioners Network) interrogates the power relations of the SCoPEd project.

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SCoPEd seems to be yet another instance of ethical sleep on the part of its authors, BPC, UKCP and BACP, institutions that aspire to the high ground of human sensibility and civic accountability. One of the long-standing deficiencies of the psy trainings that they validate, and thus the crust of institutions that represent them, notably for 1:1 work, is the lack of explicit attention to the ubiquity of power-relations. If this were not so, how else can the current SCoPEd initiative – and its likely tame acceptance by the psy demographic it refers to – be understood?

The shenanigans of UK therapy training schools’ efforts to secure their economic status via state regulation, has a long history. Isn’t SCoPEd, a remarkable pro-active coming together of entities previously laden with toxic animosity, yet another precursor for state regulation? Or as time may tell, a defensive response to whispers from government that it is minded to take the psy world in-house?

Let’s back off from this to a reprise of what, to a long-term watcher of power relations in the psy demographic, appears to be a continuing ethical contradiction. This can be outlined as follows: the overwhelming source of complaints from clients (leaving aside mistakes) is the result of practitioner behaviour that drifts from facilitation to coercion, manipulation, exploitation or bullying, i.e. dominance behaviours. But if we look at the organisations whose work has given us the SCoPEd taxonomy, they are top-down structures in which dominance behaviour has for decades been intrinsic to their ethos and operation.

People who have trained since say, 2010, may not be aware of this but it was blatantly evident in the previous decades in conflicts over market share, modal validity/invalidity, and here it is again in SCoPEd. Yet another definition of what psychopractice is, yet another taxonomy, with no sense – as I pointed out in 2007 – that such taxonomies are forms of violence and lead to taxidermy of the organism they engage with. What were then relatively open, rich multitude of modes of therapeutic relations are now in SCoPEd reduced to three levels of competency, free of any sense of the coercive forcing of the ecologies of psy practice that this entails.

“overwhelmingly likely to distort or corrupt the wildernesses of nuance in client practitioner relations”

As too often with such intentionally seductive interventions by power-brokers, the context is hidden. Why might this be so? What benefits are intended to accrue for clients and practitioners from SCoPEd? The context that is obscured seems potentially to come in two parts: preparations as I have mentioned, to embrace/field state regulation of the psy demographic; and secondly to provide succour for training schools that not only have the UKCP, BPC, BACP etc. on their backs but also the commodification of their courses via universities selling authority/validation/status. Universities that increasingly are being run as businesses, with ‘products’ and ‘services’.

In this relegation of context to invisibility, the SCoPEd initiative is also a notable example of what I have come to understand as a ‘trance-induction’. Trance induction captures attention via cogent images, sounds, phrases and naming which make the background context go missing. Current examples include ‘take back control’, ‘project fear’, ‘Make America Great Again’. Trance inductions are ubiquitous and through their temporary exclusion of the street, the venue, or the rest of the audience, in cinema, theatre, sport and literature, they can be beneficially entrancing. However when ‘trance inductions’ such as SCoPEd become embedded in our psy culture as agents of dominance, or claims of entitlement, they seem overwhelmingly likely to distort or corrupt the wildernesses of nuance in client practitioner relations.

The claim implicit in the SCoPEd initiative is that it is ‘evidence-based’, currently a very potent trance induction that typically excludes the context of how the evidence for their taxonomy was derived, how the choices were made. SCoPEd doesn’t appear to have been generated via research with people, more likely it has emerged from research on people (or even research without people); the point being that the ownership of the research rests with the researchers, which as in SCoPEd, emerges yet again as institutions presenting entrancing power-over assertions of psychopractice entitlement.

That said, the psy ecology has many inter-related strands, embracing cooperation, challenge and support – some form of civic accountability is essential. SCoPEd demonstrates only too clearly that if its layers of competencies are intended to enhance client safety – i.e. freedom from coercion, exploitation and abuse (why else would the initiative be undertaken) – the way they celebrate top-down power relations in both form and intention means they unawarely subscribe to its opposite, an ethos of entitlement, that is likely to result in client harm. This may support the economic dynamics of training institutions and their validity networking, but it is hard to see how it would be other than harmful to clients.

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Against SCoPEd: actions and materials

The consultation for the draft SCoPEd competence framework for counselling and psychotherapy closed on Friday 22 February 2019. If you are concerned about SCoPEd or you just want to understand more about the project, here’s a summary of some of the materials and activities that have emerged in response, which hopefully will help you to join the debate.

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1) Read and comment on the Alliance’s blogs, which have been viewed and shared hundreds of times each:

Joint letter to BACP, UKCP & BPC from the Alliance, PCSR, PCU, the College of Psychoanalysts and the National Counselling Society. 17 Mar 2019.

The SCoPEd Consultation: Methodologically Challenged. Dr Richard House subjects the consultation survey to critical analysis. 12 Mar 2019

SCoPEd: Buthering Psychopractice. Denis Postle interrogates the power relations in the SCoPEd project. 23 Feb 2019.

A damaging business paradigm – latest SCoPEd response by Keith Barber. 20 Feb 2019.

SCoPEd: new consultation responses Arthur Musgrave (BACP Senior Accredited counsellor and supervisor) and Joe Suart (UKCP Registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist) share their SCoPEd consultation responses. 15 Feb 2019.

The Questionable Evidence Base of SCoPEd. David Murphy, Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, interrogates the claim that the SCoPEd framework is ‘evidence-based’. 31 Jan 2019.

SCoPEd Denial, Distortion & Deception. Andy Rogers – BACP member and counselling service coordinator in further and higher education for two decades – responds to BACP’s consultation survey. 30 Jan 2019.

‘Psychoanalytic Coup’ – Andrew Samuels on the SCoPEd competence framework. 30 Jan 2019.

Regulation, Professionalism & Cultures of Dominance, by Denis Postle. 25 Jan 2018.

2) Read the Alliance’s newsletter, which has been sent to over 500 addresses.

3) Watch the Online Events live webinar event We’ve Been SCoPEd!, featuring David Murphy, Andrew Samuels, & Clare Slaney. This was oversubscribed and can still be seen on Facebook, where it has had almost 5000 views.

4) Follow and join the debate on Twitter with #SCoPEd

5) BACP members might like to sign the petition for BACP to scrap the SCoPEd project. 2500 members have already signed.

6) Read the National Counselling Society’s letter challenging BACP’s apparent u-turn on the counselling/psychotherapy differentiation.

7) Read PCSR’s excellent 10-point statement on SCoPEd.

Last, it is important that as many people as possible fill in the BACP, UKCP and BPC’s consultation survey by end of Friday 22nd February 2019.

The consultation is now closed but if you are a BACP, UKCP or BPC member, please do still contact your organisation to express your views on SCoPEd.

You can see the draft SCoPEd framework here and the equally controversial Methodology document here.

Thank you.

From the Alliance for Counselling & Psychotherapy

Contact info@allianceforcandp.org

 

Blog amended 25/02/2019 following closure of the consultation survey, and will be updated as and when new materials emerge.

 

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A damaging business paradigm: latest SCoPEd response

The sixth in our series of responses to the BACP/BPC/UKCP SCoPEd project, following responses from Andrew Samuels, Andy Rogers, David Murphy, Arthur Musgrave and Joe Suart. Here, Keith Barber (UKCP registered psychotherapist) critiques the consultation process, differentiation, methodology and the framework itself.

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Consultation Process

The clear implication of the introductory remarks to these questions is that SCoPEd is a ‘done deal’ and will be rolled out regardless of the content of consultation responses. If so, this whole exercise is therefore meaningless PR.  It does UKCP no credit, as a professional body, to associate itself with such a flawed process.

The questions and multiple-choice answers are worded in such a way that it is almost necessary to be deliberately perverse if respondents wish to answer in a way that does not support this framework.  Again, the consultation process itself is fundamentally flawed.

I do not believe that the outcome of such a flawed process will command respect in the Profession(s) nor the assent of practitioners.

Differentiation

The question of differentiation between Counsellors and Psychotherapists has been a vexed one for many years.  In spite of repeated attempts to discern such a differentiation, none has been identified that might command sufficient support among practitioners or the public to be accepted.  I can see nothing to suggest this exercise has succeeded where its predecessors have failed.

“the vast majority of therapeutic practice takes place in this overlap, in which counsellors and psychotherapists are equally competent”

Let me be clear: I believe it is possible to differentiate between some activities that are truly counselling and some that are truly psychotherapy.  However, my experience shows there is a huge overlap between them – the overlap covers ground far more extensive than the both differentiated areas put together – and the vast majority of therapeutic practice takes place in this overlap, in which counsellors and psychotherapists are equally competent to practice.  I am quite certain that a considerable majority of counsellors are either trained in or acquire skills sufficient to practice in the area known as psychotherapy (and those who can’t have the skills to refer as appropriate), while it is nonsensical to suggest that psychotherapists cannot function in the area of counselling.  The framework does not, it seems to me, acknowledge the practical implications of this reality.

Any attempt to differentiate the titles will force those seeking our help to choose, right at the start, what kind of work they seek, regardless of their actual need.  Given the stigma that still attaches to mental and psychological distress, this is likely to lead to people in need of psychotherapy choosing, rather, to enter counselling.  If the (entirely artificial, in most cases) differentiation is in any way enforced, they are unlikely to find the help they seek.

Moreover, most clients bring a huge and complex range of experiences that will require an equally large range of responses from a practitioner.  In that case they will find that significant areas they seek to work on are characterised as needing an entirely different kind of help (another practitioner entirely, at additional expense – even assuming the issues around working with two therapeutic practitioners simultaneously can be negotiated).  I quite fail to see how this may be considered to help or protect the public and would welcome enlightenment – if such exists!

The Framework

“cursory inspection of Appendix viii of the Methodology document reveals that the Chair is both a member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and closely associated with Roth & Pilling, therefore hardly independent”

Selection of the Roth & Pilling methodology must be considered controversial, at best, in view if its focus on manualised treatments.  It is impossible for an informed member of the Profession(s) to be unaware of the vigorous debates and deep unease at such ‘treatments’; the way research is used to (supposedly) support such ‘treatments’ is likewise strongly contested and there is as yet no sign of consensus in the field.  It is claimed that the SCoPEd methodology is evidence-based (another area of continuing controversy), yet it is acknowledged that this has had to be adapted “…due to a paucity of empirical research into differentiated competencies.”  In other words, we read that the study was set up with the deliberate intention of establishing differentiated competencies and that the evidence was selected with a view to achieving this result.

Given these manifold defects, I am minded to say that the Framework is not worth the paper it is printed on.  It is incomprehensible to me that such a document could be presented for approval with a view to adoption by our profession(s), and incredible that a learned professional body should allow itself to be associated with it.

I learn from a variety of other sources that the composition of the Expert Reference Group is heavily weighted towards psychoanalytic modalities; cursory inspection of Appendix viii of the Methodology document reveals that the Chair is both a member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and closely associated with Roth & Pilling, therefore hardly independent.  Again, we see defects that negate the credibility of the Framework.

Given the prevalence of psychoanalytic thinking on the ERG, it is most striking that the Framework does not see fit to prescribe competences for psychoanalysts.  I wonder if they are considered, in some way, to be above such reductive and limiting descriptions?  But why should that be so?  Or is the answer, perhaps, to be found in my previous paragraph?

“hierarchical structures, universal application of economically-driven models of outcome evaluation and a strict regulatory model”

More generally, it seems to me that the endless initiatives to systematise the field with standards identified as ‘competences’ indicates an attempt to fit the therapeutic field into what we may describe as the ‘business’ paradigm.  Here I follow Kuhn (1962/1970), who showed that the paradigm we are committed to dictates and limits even the questions we can ask, let alone the ways they can be answered.  The business paradigm privileges hierarchical structures, universal application of economically-driven models of outcome evaluation and a strict regulatory model that facilitates command and control of virtually every aspect of a field of work. It may (the jury is still out) provide economic benefits, but there is no evidence whatsoever that it is good for the psychological health fo the human beings that inhabit it.

This would not be so bad if the competency-based approach was effective.  But my experience in a previous career is that it is, in general, of little utility but comes at the cost of a huge bureaucratic overhead that quickly damages the organisation’s ability to perform its most basic tasks.  Again, the approach of this Framework is unlikely to gain the assent of most practitioners in our field and, given the increasingly-recognised association between psychological distress and (business-inspired) austerity and insecure work, gives every indication of being rather part of the problem than of the solution.

Conclusion

This Framework is not a response to any currently known need.  It is misconceived, insufficiently evidenced and reaches an inappropriate predetermined conclusion.  It will do nothing to help or protect the public but – like the proposals for statutory regulation in 2009 – will do enormous damage to the work of counsellors and psychotherapists, if it does not entirely destroy therapy as we know it. The SCoPEd process should be terminated and the resources our profession commands be redirected to meeting the needs of people in distress in the UK.

Reference

Kuhn, T. S, 1962/1970: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; University of Chicago Press

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The questionable evidence base of SCoPEd

David Murphy, Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, interrogates the claim that the SCoPEd framework is ‘evidence-based’.

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A cornerstone of the SCoPEd approach to generating their competences is to arrive at their findings having drawn from an ‘evidence base’. This is apparent in two separate claims made in the opening two paragraphs. Here the SCoPEd projects’ members say, “The aim of the SCoPEd project is to agree a shared, evidence-based generic competence framework to inform the training requirements, competences and practice standards for counsellors and psychotherapists working with adults.” And they go on in the next paragraph to say that, “The draft framework has utilised an evidence-based process of mapping existing competence frameworks, professional standards and practice standards to identify areas of overlap and areas of difference between counselling and psychotherapy.”

In this blog, the first of two tackling the issue of an ‘evidence-base’, I shall point to the fact that any reference to the use of evidence is questionable and more likely not, and therefore lacks integrity. First, let’s look at one of these statements again in more detail, “The aim of the SCoPEd project is to agree a shared, evidence-based generic competence framework to inform the training requirements, competences and practice standards for counsellors and psychotherapists working with adults”. Here the aim clearly suggests that the differentiated competences between the role of counsellor and psychotherapist will be grounded in evidence. But what do the SCoPEd team mean by evidence? And what might be an example of ‘evidence based competence’ that could be differentiable and identify clear evidence for a difference between the activities carried out under these two adjectival titles?

To first address the issue what evidence is being used, it seems that the list of sources used to arrive at the differentiated competence framework have been taken from existing lists of competences used, or even sponsored, by the same institutions that are trying to the find the evidence for the claimed differences between these titles. One of the issues with this process is that the documents tend to identify something that isn’t real. They are a fiction in regards to what people actually ‘do’. This is a well-known problem with the development of competences designed for a ‘labour market’ and they fail to adequately identify both the specifics and idiosyncrasies of actual praxis. What would be better, and would provide real evidence, is to look closely at what people actually ‘do’ in their work under these different titles.

Doing this would, I am sure, show something quite different from what is presented in the framework and might even show some new or unexpected findings. But the chance of discovering something new through this process has been closed off right from the outset because the aim is really not as it appears on the surface. The idea that counsellors are not doing the same work as psychotherapists flies in the face of all the evidence one can find from spending even just a little time listening to counsellors talking about their work. The chance to find this out has been forgone because a decision was made, at the outset, to look for the evidence in the data that already tells the SCoPEd team what they wanted to know.

‘But what does the actual evidence say?’

Let us look at just one example of a differentiation offered in the SCoPEd report. That is, Competency 3.10 under Theme 3 – Relationship, and refers specifically to the idea of ‘alliance ruptures and repairs’ (competence 3.10, 3.10b, 3.10c). In the SCoPEd document it is suggested that where there is a lack of ‘empirical evidence’, ‘grey literature’ has been used. It is difficult to know what evidence or grey literature has been used for the differentiation of this particular competence; not least because the research on therapeutic alliance, including the more specific topic of alliance rupture and repair, is one the largest bodies of empirical research in the entire psychotherapy process-outcome literature. Yet there is no citation to the empirical evidence that has been consulted. However, as this area of the psychotherapy literature is so extensive we probably should assume that the SCoPEd team will have consulted a recent meta-analysis of alliance rupture repair and outcome studies.

Looking at the differentiated competences (3.10, 3.10b, 3.10c) it seems that the SCoPEd project claim that psychotherapists are more skilled in dealing with alliance ruptures and repairs than are counsellors. But what does the actual evidence say about such a claim? Well let’s take a quick look. In a recent meta-analysis published in the American Psychological Association journal Psychotherapy (not a lightweight publication by any means) the very issue of alliance rupture and repair was considered as was its association to the improvement or progress that clients might make. Let me just say that whether or not one is against or for the quantitative paradigm, given that SCoPEd is an advocate for evidence it is probably worth noting the findings of this type of research because that is the premise on which it claims to be able to differentiate competence.

Esteemed alliance researchers Eubanks, Muran and Safran (2018) examined the association between alliance rupture repair and outcome in 11 studies involving 1,314 clients. Overall the effect size for rupture resolution and positive outcome was pretty impressive (d = .62 for those interested). Clearly good news for those theoretical approaches that regard the alliance as an integral feature of their practice (mainly psychodynamic but also CBT and some integrative therapies). A number of the studies included in this meta-analysis included ‘trainee therapists’ (so not even ‘qualified’ counsellors). The researchers tested the data to see if there were differences between the trainees and qualified/experienced therapists in this association between repairing ruptures and outcome. This was a test of moderation to see if this can account for the variance in the effects. The findings showed those studies that included primarily trainees do not differ significantly from those studies of more experienced qualified therapists in showing an association between rupture repair and outcome. This finding cannot provide evidence for supporting the claim that the more qualified/experienced a therapist is the more likely they will show an association between rupture repair and outcome.

‘the competences drawn up by SCoPEd have been deduced rather than induced from the close observations and recording of what therapists actually do’

So, the evidence from this most recent, up-to-date, and rigorous meta-analysis is overwhelmingly in favour of there being no difference between experienced/more trained therapists and the unqualified/trainee therapists in the associations they show between alliance rupture repair and outcome. But wait, the psychotherapists will say, obviously we refute this claim. Psychotherapists will work with ‘more complex and more distressed clients’ so there would be a difference if you looked at that, wouldn’t there? Well it seems the answer to that might also be available in the ‘evidence’ provided by this cutting edge meta-analysis. The evidence is as follows. Eubanks, Muran and Safran (2018) addressed the issue that more complex client work (such as that with clients given a diagnosis of a personality disorder) might mean that there would be less chance of a positive association between rupture repair and outcome. Again this was not found to alter the effects, meaning that whether or not a study included a majority of clients with a diagnosed personality disorder or not, the association between rupture repair and outcome did not differ significantly from those studies where this was not the case. So the ‘evidence’ suggests that even if psychotherapists claim to work with more distressed cases it seems this cannot be used as evidence to suggest they require more skills in working with alliance ruptures.

But wait, surely psychotherapists would be ‘trained specifically to deal with ruptures and repair’ and that is why their training is at a higher level. So now the question is what effects does having specific training in managing alliance ruptures have on the association of alliance rupture repair with outcome? Well, the same researchers completed a second meta-analysis comprising six separate studies and 276 therapists that had undergone such specific training. The findings again point to some interesting ‘evidence’. Once more, status as a trainee or qualified therapist undergoing this specific rupture repair training did not moderate the association between rupture repairs and outcome, suggesting that the finding is not affected by level of qualification. However, interestingly those training in CBT had a much stronger association between rupture repair and outcome than did the psychodynamically oriented rupture repair training. In fact, for psychodynamically trained therapists, the association was in a negative direction – suggesting the less effective they were in rupture repair, the better were client outcomes!

So what are we to make of this? Well it seems that if we are to look at the empirical evidence, that drawn from the very latest and most up-to-date evidence from meta-analysis, it appears to be suggesting that there’s little difference in association of outcome and rupture repairs in terms of the level of training a therapist has had. Of course, if we look to the ‘grey literature’ it is highly likely that we will find such differences; not least because those differences are simply statements of intent and not reality of practice. The issue here is that the competences drawn up by SCoPEd have been deduced rather than induced from the close observations and recording of what therapists, regardless of their level of qualification, actually ‘do’.

But let’s be honest, the ‘aim’ of SCoPEd is, at best, to determine what the differences are between ‘counselling’ and ‘psychotherapy’ in order to protect the various financial interests of those involved in the accrediting the training of counsellors and psychotherapists. At worst the aim is about laying the groundwork for the next attempt at protecting these titles under statute by pursuing the Statutory Regulation of counselling and psychotherapy. Referring to an ‘evidence-base’ is merely an attempt to give this project legitimacy in the eyes of the membership, who are kept in the dark about the real agendas playing out. This is an attempt to try and convince the members of BACP, UKCP and BCP – run down into the ground by the lack of employment opportunities after training – that they will be better off having these titles first differentiated and then protected. But in truth this will do nothing to protect or enhance the employment opportunities for the tens of thousands of under-employed counsellors/psychotherapists already trained and looking for work, and will do nothing to protect the public from rogue practitioners.

 

Reference

Eubanks, C. F., Muran, J. C., & Safran, S. D. (2018). Alliance rupture repair: A meta-analysis. Psychotherapy, 55, 508-519.

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SCoPEd: Denial, Distortion & Deception

The British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP), the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) and the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) – collaborating under the banner of the SCoPEd (Scope of Practice & Education) project – recently published a draft ‘competence framework’, which attempts to differentiate counselling and psychotherapy.

Andy Rogers (BACP member and counselling service coordinator in further and higher education for two decades) submitted the following response to BACP’s consultation survey.

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It is astonishing that the SCoPEd project claims this document will improve clarity for clients, employers, trainers and other stakeholders. I can only assume the competence framework exists for other political purposes, because there is certainly no clarity here, which might be forgivable if the document was at least more truthful.

But, as one of a number examples of the confused (unintentional?) deceptions in this framework, it is completely erroneous to identify 3.5.c (Ability to negotiate issues of power and authority experienced in the inner and outer world of the client or patient as part of the therapeutic process) as a ‘psychotherapist’ competency (one therefore presumably not held by mere ‘counsellors’), when for any person-centred counsellor worth their salt, this would be a central principle of everything they do! The same could be said of another ‘psychotherapist’ competency, 5.1.c. (Ability to evidence reflexivity, self-awareness and the therapeutic use of self to work at depth in the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic process).

These examples demonstrate how formal differentiation between the adopted titles often means the imposition of something (i.e. simplistic, hierarchical separation and compartmentalisation) that isn’t actually there in practice among the human beings entering into therapy as practitioners and clients. In reality, there is much fluidity and complexity, which the framework attempts to iron out by positioning psychotherapists as doing the really deep stuff, counsellors as merely dabbling, and then a mysterious in-between group that does more than the basic counsellors but isn’t quite at the psychotherapist level.

“it is not the practitioner’s title that determines what happens in the therapy relationship.”

As most of us know, these levels – assumed in the document to be clear-cut enough to be separated into columns and boxes – are manufactured. At best they are only partially truthful, some of the time, in some situations, for some individuals. They certainly do not accurately represent the field, within which many practitioners who identify as counsellors will see their day-to-day work in the ‘psychotherapist’ column; while there will be plenty of ‘psychotherapists’ who have not yet developed the depth of practice (if we describe it that way) of some ‘counsellors’. After all, it is not the practitioner’s title that determines what happens in the therapy relationship.

That we end up working under one label and not the other is subject to all sorts of choices, influences, values, historical precedents and contextual factors, and often says little to nothing about what the experience of therapy will be like for clients, which could be vastly different between any two ‘psychotherapists’ or any two ‘counsellors’. For a whole swathe of the field, such as the humanistic section – and particularly in person-centred therapy – there is no distinction at all made between ‘counselling’ and ‘psychotherapy’ in terms of the actual work (which this framework purports to articulate); the different titles merely refer to the traditions and histories of various training programmes, professional organisations/groupings and work contexts (and the job titles therein).

“When did therapists become so uncritically disengaged from the roles of history and power in the narratives we hold about ourselves?”

The therapy field is a diverse and complex ecology, which, rather than celebrate, the framework appears to want to eliminate by reasserting hierarchies that are well past their use-by date. A historical aside here is that counselling as an alternative word for psychotherapy has roots in Carl Rogers’ mid-twentieth century tactical switch from the latter to the former at the University of Chicago, which was necessitated by a law that ‘psychotherapy’ could only be practiced by medical professionals. From the very beginning of ‘counselling’, then, the different words were not functional descriptors of differing activities, roles or levels of ‘competence’, depth, ability, skill or experience but were value-laden, politically charged and subject to the operation of power and professional (self-)interest. This is no less true today, but the SCoPEd project is in complete denial about it. When did therapists become so uncritically disengaged from the roles of history and power in the narratives we hold about ourselves?!

It’s notable in sections of the framework that ‘psychotherapist’ is apparently equated with greater alignment with psychoanalytic theory. Is the field not done yet with this power struggle, with the idea that psychoanalytic theory sits at the top of a hierarchy? The ‘note on terminology’ almost acknowledges this tension but concludes, absurdly, “Where terminology has been used that could be interpreted as being modality-specific, this is not the intention.” Oh, that’s okay then – it’s the thought that counts, eh? Being ‘expert’ therapists, I thought the Expert Reference Group (ERG) might have a bit more to say about the importance of language and the power that runs through it, looking beyond stated intentions towards the deeper meanings and influences when we choose one way of saying something over another (especially in a potentially influential document such as this). No?

I was also wondering how this apparent pro-psychoanalytic bias – with its implicit discrediting and delegitimising of humanistic/existential/person-centred counselling/psychotherapy (and their associated values, not least around language) – came about. Then I noticed the ERG was made up of 12 practitioners, 7 of whom were identified as psychoanalytic, whereas only 1 was clearly identified as humanistic (and even then, only as part of an ‘integrative’ model) (see pp.72-73 of the SCoPEd Methodology document). How can the framework produce an accurate picture of the field, when the ERG does not represent the diversity within it?

But the whole project is also skewed by other assumptions and value systems around therapy, which are perhaps even more important for the future of our professions. The Roth/Pilling UCL methodology used here was developed originally by manualised CBT proponents for the CBT competence framework, which was commissioned by the Department of Health as part of IAPT’s development. As this history suggests, breaking down the relational art of therapeutic work into lists of discrete ‘competences’ is not a neutral or objective activity (however ‘evidence-based’ it disingenuously claims to be); it is a technocratic pursuit that clearly derives from the NHS-appeasing assumption that therapy can be manualised into specific skills that, if applied in accordance with the manual, provide ‘effective’ ‘treatment’ for specific ‘disorders’. In other words, the project inevitably – via its very form – aligns therapy with an instrumental and medicalised healthcare model, again potentially delegitimising approaches that see therapy as, say, a meaning-making dialogical encounter or principled way of being.

That none of these biases or agendas, and the political expediency from which they spring, are acknowledged in the framework, highlights its failure to take a therapeutically informed, self-reflective, critical thinking approach to its own motivations, intentions, guiding principles, methodology or articulation. Presumably none of this matters much if your goal is to air-brush the imperfect, fallible, human complexity of relational therapeutic work, in order to prepare for the distribution of power that statutory regulation would involve for the organisations that have composed this empty but highly potent document.

andyrogerscounselling.com

@AndyCounsellor

 

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