I think credentials in the mental health professional helps to protect the profession. It also ensures that the profession is respected and thus blocks the entry of those who do not meet the qualification. As the public gets protected from crude professionals, it also does lose in that many people will opt to go to the cheap service providers with lower skills in place of the expensive licensed individuals. Clients who cannot afford the expensive services will even opt for advice from friends or even self-treatment.
Since so far there has been no study that has adequately related licensing to the quality of services offered, the public may not necessarily be protected. The public is not lucky with licensing bodies for mental health practitioners since licensing agencies base their competence measures on that which can be measured quite easily although there lacks an empirical validation for this. Competence cannot also be directly related to work experience or even to academic credentials acquired yet these are the contents in the licensing statutes.
In mental health and psychology, research done on whether licensing yields competence has given inconclusive results. Licensing boards and certification processes have been unable of two things:
- making sure that an individual at the time of examination possesses basic information education and or training experience;
- assuring the public of the licensed practitioners of their accountability.
Thus psychotherapy may be regarded as a field of wild credentialing compared to the highly structured and rigidly regulated world of medicine. For physician certification, patients are reasonably assured that the doctor has successfully completed and passed a tough training program. It’s not so in mental health, it’s rather a more amorphous and varied affair.
For the safety of the clients, however, licensing of “therapist” or hypnotist by the state is the first step to guarantee that they could have some experience or training. Although legitimate graduate degrees and licensing may not necessarily guarantee competence, they serve as the starting point of accountability. A client can have the advantage of filing a complaint to the national professional associations and state licensing boards when a licensed professional counselor or psychologist behaves inappropriately. Although practicing psychologists have an obligation to have malpractice insurance, lay hypnotists have an exception. Thus a client may not be able to put up a legal recourse if a lay hypnotist misbehaves.