Why I Will Not Get a License

A pro and con list.

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Con: not get a license

The American Psychological Association, which grants licenses and degrees, is an unethical institution because of the ideas it has chosen to align with over the last 50 years, and especially the last ten years. It would therefore be unethical for me to even tacitly support them and their criteria. If the APA openly endorsed white supremacy, it would be obvious to abandon them, right? Well, the ideas they endorse now are the same in principle.

If it’s a question of aptitude, then yes a license matters but I already have enough credits and hours to get a license. While supervision may be helpful to some degree, I’ve learned way more about therapy from listening to heroin addicts talk about their trauma. Regardless, I don’t want to be the therapist who needs a license to communicate his aptitude. If I need a license to convince you I'm good at what I do, then I don’t deserve to be your therapist.

The therapy license is a protection racket---you bow to the APA's wishes and they put you on a list of "qualified" therapists. Except the last thing the therapy industry needs is protection because protection ultimately inhibits growth.

Licensed therapists are subject to limited confidentiality. If the client indicates they may harm someone or themselves, then I would be legally obligated to report this to the police---also if I receive a court-order to discuss my client’s mental health. This creates a burden on the client-therapist relationship and smacks of Orwellian intrusion. To be clear, there are situations in which I will break confidentiality for the good of the client, but since I don’t have a bureaucratic sword of Damocles over my head, when I do need to make this decision, I will be less concerned with saving my ass and more concerned with saving my client’s ass.

Remember the prom promise in high school? Administration wanted you to sign a contract saying you wouldn’t drink prom weekend, and if you did and got caught you would receive extra punishment. The only upside is your sense of moral superiority because of your allegiance to dubious bureaucrats. Yeah, a therapy license today is the adult version of that.

The only good reason to get a license is if in some way protected the client, but it doesn’t protect the client, it protects the therapist. In fact, it hurts the client. It limits what I deem to be ethical confidentiality, as mentioned above, and it limits who I can talk with re political borders, which is only because of an insurance company transgression, and insurance companies are the effectively the fourth branch of government given how much political pull they have.

The modern therapy license is more of a union, and you don’t join unions when you’re good at what you do. This explains much of the vitriol licensed therapists fling at unlicensed therapists---you can hear the “scab” connotation in their sad attempt at ridicule.

Cognitive-behavior therapy, another decree of the APA, is unethical. It’s a short-term fix, which can be more hurtful than no fix, and it makes no attempt to explicate how emotions work, which is the ultimate reason why therapy even exists in the first place. What’s more is cognitive behavior therapists claim their methods are “evidence-based.” This is not only presumptuous in that it implies any other kind of therapy isn’t based in evidence, but to make such a broad, dismissive claim in a field steeped in error is unethical as well.

A license would severely limit my ability to market to prospective clients, and I think marketing is a deeply moral profession because I’m not a Gen X burnout. What marketing amounts to is communication---it’s communication about how a service can help people. It’s the lack of this communication of modern therapy that further isolates it from people and the problems they deal with in the real world.

The number one principle of my company is the client comes first---ie what’s best for the client is what’s best for everyone. I have it posted on my cork board there to the left of my computer so I can meditate on what it means every day. And what’s best for the client has nothing to do with me pursuing credentials that ultimately render me a tool of the state.

Pro: get a license

More people would like me.