I couldn’t believe this even when I saw it.
Goodtherapy.org initiated a poll of Mental Health practitioners on their mailing list. Here are the results: http://www.goodtherapy.org/201103-poll-results.html# [Note: you have to vote in the poll to see the results, but you don't have to join goodtherapy.org to vote.]
When I checked it today (March 26), 61.1% of respondents answered “yes” to the question:
Are you in favor of state licensing boards requiring pre-licensed interns to undergo psychotherapy as part of licensure requirements, assuming all potential issues are addressed and adequately resolved prior to implementing such a requirement?
I’m not sure what my colleagues (at least the 61%) are thinking here. That all psychology interns have mental health problems? That they need their personalities rebuilt before being unleashed on the fragile public? That they prove how much they “believe in the product” by investing heavily in it whether it’s indicated or not? Perhaps it’s as simple as “You want to practise psychotherapy? You must be crazy!”
We do know that therapy usually works better when the client is motivated to seek it out. And that it helps if the client believes that their therapist is motivated to help and that his or her approach aligns with the client’s beliefs about and expectations of therapy. Will those factors be present in this proposal?
Just doesn’t make sense to me. Am I off beam here? What do you think? If you’re a client/consumer, do you think your therapist should have to have done their own therapy before being licensed to practise? What do you think if you’re a practitioner?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Of course therapists should have their own therapy. I wouldn’t see anyone who hadn’t. The healing factor is the therapeutic relationship, therefore, the therapists needs to ‘know thyself’. Without self-awareness, the therapist would be projecting their stuff onto the client left, right and centre. Therapy isn’t about ‘fixing’, it is about building a deep relationship with oneself – the by product of that is often a change in behaviour, health and well-being. The fixing mentality, or that people go to therapy because there is something wrong with them comes from the medical model. We need to think more holistically than that.
I was a client (4 years of psychotherapy), then trained to be a psychotherapist where I had to have 40 sessions a year of therapy for the duration of my training – 8 years in total!