What Do We Do About Professional Competency?
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?
The Traditional Understanding vs The Social Rewrite
The conversation amongst board members made it clear to me that competency is not something you define in advance, in an all-inclusive definition. It's something you develop over time, standards of care if you prefer, based on a changing scientific understanding of things.
Historically, competence in any medical field has at the very least meant, do no harm. Common sense dictates that harm means your patient is no worse off physically or mentally than he was before he walked in your office. Currently we have an entire generation or two of social justice adherents whose first step in promoting anything is to redefine perfectly established terms so they fit the narrative outcome they're looking for, undermining common sense in the process. Their idea of "harm" is, for example, failure to affirm a patient's self-diagnosis involving massive cognitive confusion over sexual identity issues.
Do No Harm is where we begin the conversation, layering science-based standards of care as they are developed. So,
"Competency is the requirement to provide care for our clients based on replicable, peer-reviewed science that improves their condition from the point we met them."
Where Competency Ends and Malpractice Begins
Until recently, competency by that definition was determined by a collection of professional entities each with a vested interest in maintaining a strict ethical code to maintain a high level of accountability in the profession.
Accrediting organizations and an academic environment grounded in science; unbiased peer-review systems desiring to maintain their levels of prestige kept an overlord watch. Professional organizations with a vested interest in the same provided the ground support needed for practicing clinicians. And of course, the public has the biggest say in it. They get to vote with their wallets.
Most of that has changed.
Science has taken a distant back-seat to a Marxist way of thinking as the primary driver behind what constitutes competency. It has infiltrated every entity I just mentioned and that has radically changed the academic output from trained professionals to indoctrinated social warriors. Competency is not an objective anymore other than to produce competent ideologues who will blindly pursue the objective of their cult leaders.
Fortunately the final arbiter of competency, the public, is waking up. Whether it's too late or not remains to be seen but I think we still have time to save the profession. An informed, educated patient is a SJW's worst nightmare.
Bottom-Line
So, no, I don't think it's necessary or even possible to craft a definition for competency that encompasses what happens in the field. It's simply too fluid. We have competency definitions in our rulebooks already and while the english could be cleaned up that usually involves complicating things in an attempt to be more specific and we know how that will turn out. The larger canvas to clean up is outside of the rulebooks.
The profession requires a macro-definition like the one I crafted above; essentially what's in our rulebooks. Then it's up to the public, their money, and their legislatures to force these entities to right their ships and return to replicable, science-based, peer-reviewed sanity, then rational, common-sense standards of care will follow. That is what has to happen to restore competency in the mental health field.
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Thank you for this post. One of the first classed I had to take in my Master’s Program was a research class. It charged us with relying on peer reviewed research for the gold standard of therapy and therapy models. I have anger and fear around the counseling profession trading this foundation for what feels right at this moment.
Anger and fear are good motivators, Meg Hamilton. What our movement needs are more ticked off (primarily) female counselors willing to stand up and do what you just did….speak your mind. Looking froward to meeting you.