News from the Front: Psychic Alert!

Work and life have been a little too hectic recently, and the blog is going to suffer for it because I can’t seem to settle down and write anything that makes sense.

So in lieu of an actual post, here is short anecdote from a 2008 session of the Texas Board of Examiners – the board which oversees the licensed members of the various mental health professions in this state.

Did you know that you don’t even have to be a licensed mental health professional in order to have a complaint filed against you with the Board? All you really need is a disgruntled person who isn’t too particular about choosing their audience.

Such was the case last year when a professional psychic was was obliged to come all the way to Austin to respond to a complaint which had been filed against her by some idiot who couldn’t figure out the difference between pyschic and therapist.

Needless to say, the Board of Examiners does not license or oversee psychics. The main and only concern of the Board in this matter was to be sure that the psychic was not in any way representing herself as a licensed mental health professional in the course of conducting her business.

And she wasn’t. The complainant was just a moron.

Although this is an extreme case, it is nevertheless representative of a certain problem which is ever-present at the Board’s ethics sessions – the confusion over what, exactly, constitutes an ethical violation by a therapist.

Clients have some very interesting ideas on that subject. Many of them seem to think that anything which hurts their feelings or makes them angry is actually a punishable offense.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if that were actually true??

Of course, hurt feelings and not getting your own way are not ethical violations – but each session of the ethics board is likely to have at least one (and often more) complaints filed by people who think they are – and the Board is required to investigate every complaint, no matter how obviously frivolous or stupid. They even had to waste time investigating the psychic!<

Fortunately, the Board is very capable of making the distinction between a frivolous complaint and viable one, and that is something for which we can all be grateful. But for the clinician (or the psychic) in question, even an frivolous complaint entails hassle and headache – which is why those client populations who are prone to creating complaints out of nothing are the same populations who have a hard time finding qualified therapists to treat them.

I have found the Board’s ethics sessions to be very instructive on the risks inherent in being a mental health professional. Everyone is so consumingly concerned about protecting the patient, but the safeguards in place for the professionals from their clients could really bear some attention.

I mean, a complaint can be filed against a mental health professional with absolutely no factual basis at all, and it will still have to be investigated.

So therapists put their professional lives and reputations at stake every single day by offering of themselves, their time, their skills, and their compassion, to a bunch of mentally unstable people who can turn on them at any time – for any reason, or for no reason at all.

And that really does happen – it happens all the time. Even if you never get the opportunity to actually sit in on one of the ethics sessions, a glance over the records of the Board’s ethical decisions (publically available on their website) can still reveal that there are differences in the complaints received and reviewed by the board.

There are some serious complaints which receive serious consequences, such as fines, Board-mandated supervision, license suspension, or license revocation (that is, some valid complaints). And then there are a substantial number where the complaint was dismissed, sometimes with a warning of some sort, sometimes without even that (that is, a substantial number of frivolous complaints).

Each of these frivolous complaints represents a clinician whose entire professional life and livelihood was temporarily called into question by one disgruntled ex-client with an axe to grind.<

And we wonder why it’s so hard to find a qualified therapist??
Looking at it from this perspective, it’s really more of a surprise that there are so many therapists who are willing to accept the potential risks of their work.

Keep in mind that the axe grinders who claim to share your diagnosis are representing you in the eyes of the world. Every complaint filed by someone with a dissociative diagnosis is representing DID to the Board, to the other clinicians and observers at the ethics session, and to everyone who hears about the proceedings from those clinicians and observers.

It behooves us all to be sure that we encourage the public representation we want people to have of us, rather than encouraging the people who are making us all look bad.

Just something to think about.