I recently gave a workshop for colleagues and students about working with the media. My opening slide is an email that starts, “Hi Marc. I swear to god, you seem to be the only psychologist in Wellington who speaks to the media …”
This is incorrect in two ways. I funnel a lot of media inquiries to Wellington clinical psychologist Dougal Sutherland these days. And I’m not a “psychologist”. I may teach psychology, publish psychology and supervise people who go on to be psychologists, but in Aotearoa, you need to be registered with the New Zealand Psychologists Registration Board to legally use the title of “psychologist”.
To be registered you need at least two things; you need appropriate training, and you need to have been supervised in your practice for a minimum of 1500 hours. A variety of tertiary institutions train people towards vocational psychology “scopes” of practice – as clinical psychologists, counselling psychologists, educational psychologists and neuropsychologists. In each of these programmes you learn how to do the job (eg, counselling psychology) and you complete placements and internships where you put that learning into practice under “close supervision” (in the board’s language). When you graduate you leave with the qualification and eligibility for immediate registration.
If you want to practice health psychology, or organisational psychology, however, there are no scopes specific to those disciplines that you can register into. This means you can do the training, do the supervision, and you register instead under the “general” scope.
Just as you should never, ever feed a mogwai after midnight, you should never, ever misrepresent yourself as a psychologist if you’re not registered, or misrepresent yourself as having training and skills you’ve not been trained in. The requirement for registration means the public can be confident they’re getting an accredited psychological service from someone who can lay claim to the title.
It’s also an issue when someone else misrepresents you as a psychologist when you’re not registered. It’s easy for lay people to assume that because it says psychology on the label of my tin, that I’m a psychologist. I have been copied into more than a few emails from the Reg Board saying, “Dear [media organisation], can we please remind you again not to refer to Marc Wilson as a psychologist …”
I don’t claim to offer counselling or therapy services, but it’s true that many vocations other than psychologists do provide important support to others. In fact, the email in question was asking why people pour their hearts out to their hairdressers, to bartenders, or to their masseuse. A simple answer is that it’s for many of the same reasons people do see psychologists or counsellors – it’s a chance to work through what’s going on in your life without the potential judgment that might come from doing so with a husband or a girlfriend. So ironic.
Something that proto-psychologists learn early on is that there is no silver bullet for mental wellbeing. There is a wealth of different approaches to therapy: cognitive behavioural therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, rational emotive therapy, psychodynamic therapies … and they all work.
A big part of therapy success is the “working alliance” that comprises a shared expectation of the goals of therapy, the tasks that need to be done to achieve those goals, and a bond or rapport between therapist and client. In fact, reviews suggest that feeling that you’re safe and can trust your therapist is at least as important for positive outcomes as the specific form of therapy. I’ve never been trained in the working alliance. Don’t ask me for therapy.
