Hold to appropriate professional boundaries. Vincent Keter, a lawyer and high court advocate outlined three recent cases. He concluded with the view that yes, therapy can be harmful, so severe as to warrant the intervention of the law without any need for mediation by a profession. Secondly that Statutory Regulation was legally irrelevant, as these recent cases had shown, judicial review was an adequate route for legal redress for a complainant. David Mellor of the hosting Association of Independent Psychotherapists, went down the list of questions posed in the conference invitation.
Statutory regulation is necessary and inevitable.
Psychotherapy does more harm than we think. De-registered psychotherapists continue to practice. Statutory regulation of psychotherapy could go a long way if the registrars and examiners were well funded. However, David noted that so long as training organisations needed students, corners would be cut on standards and that registration would be undermined if, due to this kind of financial consideration, the UKCP sections continued to have changeable standards. Not nearly enough in the wider political context of schools and prisons he argued, due to the hidden agendas of the psychotherapy profession.