eIpnosis has lately been beset by gloom that hid fury at the perversion of democracy which the advent of the HPC's Professional Liaison Group on December 4th promises.
Anyone paying attention to these matters knows that the HPC had issued a Call for Ideas running from 23 July 2008 to 24 October 2008, inviting comments on, and help with, the process of regulation of the psychological therapies that would inform the activities of the PLG.
That dissembling was written into the process became apparent at the eIpnosis meeting with Marc Seale and Michael Guthrie when Guthrie let it be known that, whatever else the PLG might think it could do, it would be following a ‘workplan’ given to them by the HPC. A workplan for the implementation of state regulation, i.e. that the ‘call for ideas consultation’ process was a sham.
However dishonesty of this kind is hard to sustain since it involves holding both consistency of story and secrets. We’ll come to the latter in a moment.
As the HPC reports in its Call for Ideas summary for the PLG meeting on the 4th December
We received 110 responses to the call for ideas, and of these responses, 23 respondents (21%), including three organisations, did not answer the specific questions we asked. They said instead that they were opposed to regulation and outlined the reasons behind their opposition.
So far so good.
However this 21% hides the more interesting fact that while there are 5000 words of specific help—presumably from the training and accrediting bodies, the organizations with the most to lose from not helping install state regulation—there are no less that 2500 words of dissent, objections to state regulation of the psychological therapies. Almost all the general comments were objections, only 516 words were supportive1.
How will the PLG members at the 4th December and subsequent meetings handle the discrepancy between the role they have signed up for—helping get the psychological therapies into the state’s filing cabinet via their Document Two, the 'workplan'—and the sense conveyed in the PLG’s Document One, that SR is a Huge Mistake?
Will this be resolved openly in the public meetings? With witnesses? Really? Actors in the tragedy have openly confided that backchannel deals would be done. Backstairs secrecy will surely prevail.
Of course eIpnosis’s characteristic misplaced optimism expects that due to acknowledging the split between the Call for Ideas dissent and the HPC’s workplan, the PLG meeting will break up in disarray. But probably not, the meeting will go about its prescribed task and quietly administer the kiss of death to the psychological therapies.
How will they sleep at night these people?
1 see this eIpnosis review of the Call for Ideas summary document with dissent statements highlighted
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