Interns and associates in the master’s level mental health professions in California will take a law and ethics exam in their first year of registration, under an exam restructure taking effect in January 2016.
Family therapy
AAMFT restructure vote fails. What’s next?
The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) announced today that the membership vote on a proposed AAMFT restructure was short of the 2/3 majority needed for the restructure to take effect.
Approximately 61% of voters supported the plan, with 39% opposed.
Had the vote passed, AAMFT’s state and provincial divisions would have been dissolved in favor of a more centralized structure. Members would have been able to organize themselves into “special interest groups” based on geography, clinical focus, or other interests.
See me at the 2015 AAMFT Annual Conference
I’m proud to be involved in a number of activities at this year’s AAMFT Annual Conference in Austin, Texas.
APA torture loophole is in other ethics codes too
The American Psychological Association apologized on Friday for its actions that allowed psychologists to participate in the torture of military detainees. Those actions are detailed in the extensive “Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture” (otherwise known simply as the Hoffman report). It is the most thorough examination to date of how APA staffers, aiming to remain in the good graces of the Central Intelligence Agency and (especially) the Department of Defense, actively sought to create ethics policies that allowed psychologists to be involved with torture and shielded them from consequences for doing so.
Licensing exams get a failing grade
Note: The following is an edited excerpt from Saving Psychotherapy: How therapists can bring the talking cure back from the brink. You can buy it on Amazon.
Licensing exams do not assess your effectiveness as a therapist. They aren’t meant to. That bears repeating: License exams do not assess your effectiveness as a therapist. They are a licensing board’s best effort at assessing whether you have the minimal knowledge (not skill, knowledge) to be able to practice independently without being a danger to the public. That’s all. When therapists decry the fact that license exams are nothing like doing therapy, they’re right – and their point isn’t relevant. Exams aren’t supposed to be like therapy. If you want to know how good you are as a therapist, look elsewhere, because exams are not and are not intended to be a barometer of clinical effectiveness. They are a somewhat crude assessment of safety for independent practice.
With that aim in mind, do they work? Do licensing exams make therapists safer?
There’s remarkably little data to answer that question.