Sir, – Sheila Wayman’s article on the dispute between psychotherapists and Coru over proposed training standards makes one thing clear: the people who will treat the most vulnerable clients in this State are not being listened to by the body charged with regulating them (“Should therapists be in therapy? Unpacking the rift over psychotherapy standards in Ireland”, Your Wellness, September 15th).
The Irish Council for Psychotherapy and the European Association for Psychotherapy have told Coru, in detail and at great length, that training without a specified minimum duration, without mandatory personal therapy, and without continuous clinical supervision falls short of what the profession requires. Coru’s response has been to restate its position rather than meaningfully engage.
Coru will point to its public consultation but will omit that most responses favoured maintaining core standards, and that some respondents – training providers whose courses would not otherwise meet current core standards – have an obvious interest in seeing them lowered. It will also omit that, as per documents obtained under Freedom of Information, it rejected its own Counsellor and Psychotherapist Registration Board’s advice to retain mandatory personal therapy.
When Coru speaks of making training more “accessible” by removing personal therapy in training it means “cheaper” – a faster route to shortening waiting lists on paper, not to training the professionals those lists actually need.
RM Block
Vulnerable individuals will bear the cost, those seeking help for trauma they can barely articulate, repeating a familiar pattern where the State promises protection for the vulnerable and fails to deliver it.
Coru would do well to ask why the psychotherapists and professionals with the most direct knowledge of what public protection requires are the ones it has chosen not to hear – and if they are willing to live with the damage it will most certainly do. – Yours etc,
JACKY GRAINGER, MIAHIP
Board director, Irish Council for Psychotherapy,
Board Chair IAHIP,
Dublin 12.
