Straw Poll Talkback phone-in
Radio4 4th September

Anne Casement from London
Anne Casement, I’m the chair of the UK Council for Psychotherapy and I want to talk about just that issue, which is registration and regulation.
At the UK Council we run the national register for psychotherapists and we have four and half thousand fully trained qualified therapists on our register. They have to fulfil entry, training and ethical requirements. At the moment, we’re a voluntary register but we are now in the process of  moving to registration by law, to statutory registration, we’re actually in the process of doing that.
You would then be the professional body and without qualifications from you, people would not be able to practice?
Exactly So. We’ve are seeking to protect the title of psychotherapist, so any body after that, once we’ve registered by law who calls themselves a psychotherapist will have us to deal with. This is to protect the public this is will be a much greater protection once we have registration by law, although at the moment, as I say, we have a voluntary register, the UK Council for Psychotherapy, we’re at a hundred and 67 Great Portland Street…
I’m not sure I can use this as an advertising…
I’m sorry…
I’m sure people will find you at the UK Council of Psychotherapy. But I wanted to ask you, you’d be a good person to know, has there been an explosion of interest in doing psychotherapy? Has there been this move towards the culture we’ve been hearing about?
Well there certainly has been, there’s no doubt about that, I mean our own register has grown enormously just in, only, since it was launched in 1993, I think we had something like two thousand, we’re now four and half thousand, these are fully qualified psychotherapists of course but that I think gives an indication a microcosm if you like of the macrocosm.
Are there risks of people not being qualified? What are the risks?
Great risks. Great risks, because as you can imagine the sort of emotional disturbance, the disturbance that can be caused, to families, the kind of psychological disturbance that can be caused by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Not just for the person that is being practised on but for the practitioner. You see it can stir up a whole lot of unresolved issues in somebody who is not qualified, not properly trained, trying to act as a therapist, 
OK Thank you very much’.