You may be surprised to learn that I have decided to come out of retirement to return to the wacky world of employment. Over a decade since I finished full time work, supposedly for good, I can now reveal that I am setting myself up as a psychotherapist and a counsellor.
I have no formal qualifications, or even informal ones, but that, it appears, doesn’t matter. The terms psychotherapist and counsellor are not ‘protected‘ in law. Anyone can assume these titles, so why not me?
I cannot call myself a doctor of medicine, a GP, a surgeon or a physician because these are protected titles so I cannot set up a local health centre, which is a bit of a bummer because there must be so much money to be made. There are still ways of exploiting the system – I can call myself a nutritionist despite having no qualifications or even skills, but not a dietician, which requires an actual qualification – but my best option would be to make a killing, quite possibly literally, in the mental health business.
Mental health business? Really, business? It’s not a business or an industry, surely? More a service and a public service at that? Not if I get my way.
You may have gathered that I am not entirely serious about taking advantage of and making from people with mental health conditions, or illnesses or perhaps I should refer to them. On the contrary, I am permanently angry at how mental illness is regarded when compared to physical illness. No health service worth its salt would allow complete amateurs, some with utterly meaningless qualifications, to carry out medical procedures without any formal training, except when it comes to mental health.
You would not expect an experienced bricklayer to carry out a triple heart bypass surgery or a taxi driver to engage in complex cancer surgery, but if you have depression and anxiety then it’s fair enough to allow any old Tom, Dick and Harry (and their female equivalents) to treat you.
I know how mad this is. I once worked with a woman who was a hypnotherapist and she offered me her not inexpensive services. I was extremely unwell with depression at the time, having been driven to the edge of a mental breakdown at the hands of the bullies and abusers of the British Red Cross. I was desperate and briefly considered taking her up on her offer, until I remembered that actually the NHS does not offer hypnotherapy. Here’s what the NHS actually says:
When looking for a private hypnotherapist:
- choose someone with a healthcare background – such as a doctor, psychologist or counsellor
- if you have mental ill health or a serious illness (such as cancer), make sure they’re trained in working with your condition
- if you’re looking for a therapist for your child, make sure they’re trained to work with children
- check they’re registered with an organisation that’s accredited by the Professional Standards Authority
There are other warnings, too, one of which is this:
In the UK, hypnotherapists do not have to have any specific training by law.
This means hypnotherapy can be offered by people with little training who are not health professionals.
I declined and for some reason our burgeoning friendship came to an end. Funny that. But it’s like the scam artists who grift a living through “motivational speaking“. You would never expect someone with cancer or heart disease to be treated by these people, so why would you use quack medicine for mental health? The answer is because there is money to be made.
There is a serious message at the heart of my pathetic attempts at humour, which is that our mental health services are in crisis. There is barely any NHS provision for anything between mild poor mental health and being sectioned. Between a few weeks of counselling and being banged up there lies nothing. And that gap is being filled by the untrained and unqualified people I pretended I was about to join.
I’m afraid I cannot understand the motivation of those whose aim in life is to seek to make money out of sick people, but when the state provision is inadequate then this happens.
These things are not called ‘alternative medicine’ for nothing. They are called it because they are generally speaking an unscientific alternative to conventional medicine, a bit like Reiki, Aromatherapy and Homeopathy. And what makes them attractive to practitioners is that anyone can do it.
Tempting though it may be for some to practice what isn’t true or real, I’ll stick to the tried and tested boring stuff, based on science and carried out by properly qualified experts. Michael Gove once announced that people have had enough of experts. Not me, Michael. Not me.
