The AMHP Blog Post Archive
Executive Summary Informed consent is being delivered in a sterile, minimalist manner that satisfies legal teams but does very little to actually inform patients of potential outcomes. We believe the rapid decline in the quality of informed consent is due largely to the verticalization of healthcare which has produced a shift in professional priorities from patient outcomes to corporate profit motives. Healthcare providers have an ethical obligation to deliver informed consent to their patients in areas where other providers may have failed to do so and the informed consent obligation does not end with the intake paperwork process. Informed Consent The verticalization of healthcare is largely responsible for the failure to provide substantive informed consent. The shift in focus from…
Executive Summary-Chiles v. Salazar Your protected 1st Amendment (1A) rights as a citizen travel with you into your professional relationships with your clients. The State cannot tell you what to think (Conscience Protections) or what you can or cannot talk about (Viewpoint Discrimination) in your session room with your patients. The delivery of services you provide is the Professional Conduct that your licensing State is concerned with, and that is what they are regulating. Your 1A free speech is viewed as a component of your delivery of services suite. So long as what you say does not run afoul of existing code or recognized ethics, and does not bring about harm to your client you may say and discuss anything…
Executive Summary Professional Competency is a high level of service delivery built on science and evidence-based platforms, polished with high moral and ethical standards. There is little if any room for social agendas or political ideologies in the academic preparation of our next generation of therapists. Professional Competency It is our position that the academic competency components have been redefined and lowered to more accurately reflect a collegiate preparation based on socialist ideology, rather than science. The courses have titles that satisfy legislative requirements for licensure but the material has been gutted and replaced with social justice indoctrination dogma. It’s frequently taught by self-avowed Marxist professors in an environment that has traded the free exchange of ideas for an oppressive…
I’m Kathleen Mills LPC-S and co-founder of AMHP. Kathleens Public Comments to BHEC Council I’m a survivor of the DSHS era regime‘s good ol’ boy complaint process. That faith-killing experience has given me a very rich, real world backdrop against which I can confidently evaluate the progress BHEC has made over the last six years. You have put this profession back on the administrative rails it has lacked for so long and I thank you for that, but we face a much larger problem now. Our profession has been under attack since at least 2000 for its very soul and I would like to expand on two comments Phillip made earlier. What Are We Doing to Raise the Bar of…
I’m Phillip Crum, Joe Citizen, and co-founder of AMHP. Phillips Public Comments to BHEC Council The last two years have seen positive new additions to all four boards. A renewed devotion to purpose, especially by the public members willing to question the professional members. That’s been extremely encouraging and I hope that trend continues. The Problems We Face That our new counselor development pipeline has been overrun by ideologues is the biggest problem this profession faces. We’re awarding masters degrees to political activists who base their mental health practices on political theory, a group empathy mindset and feelings. We’re licensing them and the people of TX get to pay for it in more than one way and that has to…
Executive Summary The West, particularly the USA, finds itself in a major uptick in the number of documented familial estrangements. The shift in both reported type and volume began in the late 19th century and continues to the present with highly detrimental effects on all participants, both short and long-term. The materials-based survival issues that fueled estrangement prior to 1900 shifted to a more individualist, self-focused list of grievances related to emotional survival and victimhood, rather than the existential considerations experienced during our predominantly agrarian era. Familial Estrangement We view Cultural Marxism and Feminism as key factors in the purposeful destruction of the Western Family Unit, fueling the spike in familial estrangement of the past several decades. We see the…
Can We Save Professional Competency? Anyone who has been around since before the year 2000 knows that the bar of practice competency in the mental health field is arguably much lower than it was just two decades ago. It’s been slowly and subtly redefined to operate not from a base of replicable, peer-reviewed science to one that now platforms its approach on social-political agendas and feelings. The BHEC administrative staff at last week’s LPC board meeting was attempting to redefine competency and standardize it across all four boards which, on the surface, sounds like a good thing. This raised three questions in my mind: what is competency, who gets to define it, and can it be defined in the rulebooks?…
Rick McCarthy Public Comment 5-8-26 to BBS Board Good afternoon, my name is Rick McCarthy, LMFT, former Oral Examiner. Thank you for the opportunity to return and offer a constructive update. The Opportunity Before Us My purpose today is encouraging: I believe there is a practical path forward to strengthen those standards through a modern, virtual clinical competency assessment, a streamlined oral component that evaluates real-time judgment, ethics, and therapeutic presence. When the oral exams were discontinued in 2003, the decision was driven by cost and administrative burden, not because the exam lacked validity or usefulness. In fact, the oral format uniquely assessed what written tests cannot, how a clinician thinks, responds, and communicates in live clinical situations. We have…
Prior Blog Posts
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