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This book is a collection of papers initially offering a thorough and often painful and troubling exploration of therapists’ experiences of Complaints Procedures. As the editors, Dr Adah Sachs and Dr Valerie Sinason, state in the Introduction ‘This book was born out of complaints both editors went through (and were acquitted of)’. Later chapters focus on the historical perspective, whilst the penultimate chapter offers a harsh critique of current complaint procedures maintaining they ‘are often anti-therapeutic and unethical in their treatment of therapists’. This latter stance is firmly echoed in the final chapter which concludes ‘The current system of investigation over-promises and under-delivers’. Overall, this book is comprised of powerful and wounding clinical papers, contextual history and strident and well researched informed analysis of the failings in the Complaints Procedures operated by voluntary and statutory regulators all under the wing of the Professional Standards Authority (PSA).
There is acknowledgement that some complaints raised do prove that the patient has suffered or been wronged. The emphasis, however, is more on the wronged therapist. This is unlike the recent article in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy ‘The experience of making a complaint in a case of professional misconduct: towards a safer profession’ by John Hook and Intra Fines (2023), which gives greater focus to the patient raising the complaint. The same powerful feelings and distress, however, caused throughout the processes are echoed; anxiety, shame and humiliation dominating respective participants. Visceral feelings and suffering are the result of complaint processes whichever side one is occupying.
The Hook and Fines article outlines that the pain of the complainant is compounded by the experience of not being fully validated; that they had to prove they had been harmed. Similarly in this book constant references were made by therapists feeling they were treated as ‘guilty until pr