‘Real nastiness’: therapist training courses in UK can be ‘toxic’ and need regulating, say students

When Sally Mumford enrolled in a training course to become a psychotherapist in 2020, she was excited to start a new career.

She hoped to help people understand how their feelings and behaviour were shaped by their pasts. But she quickly realised that the course might not be what she had expected. “I arrived like a lamb to the slaughter,” she said. “There was a real nastiness that percolated down from the top.”

Mumford said her tutors at the training centre in London let bullying between students go unchecked. “It was all part of making you into a therapist. The whole ethos was to break you down and build you back up how they wanted you to be.”

Mumford is one of more than a dozen people who have studied for psychotherapy qualifications at UK institutions who told the Observer that some courses cross the line from challenging to toxic, with tutors bullying students. Some said their tutors made humiliating remarks to them in public, and left them feeling too scared to speak up or leave the course.

But the industry is largely unregulated; “psychotherapist” is not a protected profession, so anyone can set up a practice with that title.

Psychotherapist training is also unregulated, and there is a wide range of qualifications across the UK. 

Amanda Williamson, a psychotherapist who has been campaigning for regulation in the industry for more than a decade, is concerned about “toxic” training courses. “I’ve heard negative feedback about all manner of courses at prominent universities, including appalling tales of bullying and badly-run ‘group process’,” Williamson said.

Since psychotherapy training requires students to be vulnerable, she argues, regulations must be more rigorous than in other industries. Therapists and training institutions should be bound by a consistent code of ethics, and regulated by the same body, she said. “Regulation, or at least an inquiry to shine a light on these toxic hotspots that are allowed to fester … is very much overdue.”

Read full story

Source: The Guardian, 17 November 2024