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In Great Britain the medical profession and seven professions supplementary to medicine (as well as the legal and other similar professions) are registered by statute. There has been a growing demand, over almost ten years, that psychotherapists should also be registered. The Royal College of Psychiatry and the British Medical Association are in favour, as well as many individual, non-medical, psychotherapists. They consider that patients and practitioners would both benefit by such a new law.
In 1978 a working party of representatives from the main organisations of psychotherapists—the Association of Child Psychotherapists, the British Association for Behavioural Psychotherapy, the British Association of Psychotherapists, the British Psycho-Analytical Society, the Institute of Group Analysis, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Society of Analytical Psychology—issued their report, the result of thirteen joint meetings held over three years. Observers from some other organisations and one from the Department of Health and Social Security attended the meetings, which were chaired by an independent barrister, Mr Paul Seighart. The report recommends statutory registration; and the proposal, that efforts should be made to put that recommendation into action, is open now for public debate.
There was unanimous agreement in favour of a statutory scheme of registration. Careful thought preceded the decision to recommend that the draft law should incorporate ‘indicative’ regulation: it would become a criminal offence (as it is for medical and legal practitioners) for someone to call himself or herself a member of the profession of psychotherapists if he or she were not registered. The statute would protect the general title, ‘Registered Practitioner of Psychotherapy’, and members of each particular participating organisation would, under the code of ethics to be safeguarded by the council of the profession, use, in addition, only the name of the particular therapy for w