Mental Health: Unregulated Treatment

Baroness Murphy Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy (CB)]

My Lords, I have been a psychiatrist for 40 years, and it will not surprise your Lordships that I agree with every word that has been said in this welcome short debate of the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly.

I have long been astonished that we have such regulation for practically every healthcare profession under the sun except psychotherapy. Art therapists, for example, are registered and regulated; so are osteopaths and chiropractors, who both have their own regulatory councils. Yet we left the Professional Standards Authority struggling to think through how it would approach this problem. It could not regulate this massive amount of mental health care without doing something about it, and so it developed its accreditation scheme— and all credit to it for doing so—but the time really has come.

Efficacy is clearly not the issue at stake because, after all, there are many qualified physicians and psychiatrists who are not very efficacious. Nevertheless, we try to ensure that they do not cause positive harm by making sure they have appropriate training. The issue is whether a person is setting themselves up to provide care and support to somebody else. That is healthcare, and somebody doing that needs to be regulated.

I have heard it said that some of these therapists do not want to be regulated. I am sure they do not, but if you were here in 1856 and listened to the antipathy in the debates towards the notion that you might regulate doctors, you would hear the same arguments. The time has come.

There are now over a million new people coming into the health service to ask for psychotherapy every year, and we provide that to them, admittedly through accredited organisations. Nevertheless, there are a huge number of people getting it, and it is clear that the time has come to offer proper regulation and reassure the people coming to ask for help that individuals have got at least some accreditation and that we can protect the public from harms.