Abstract
In Therapy Thieves: How to Save Mental Health Care From Its Providers, author Francis Martin opens with a central question: “Why are counselors and psychotherapists committed to failure?” Martin lays out the problem, namely that there are too many poorly regulated and frankly “bogus” counselors and psychotherapists in practice who are placing their clients in peril. He describes this group as “therapy thieves” who undermine the profession and essentially steal from their clientele. In addition, he goes one step further and calls out those professionals who remain complicit as colluding in this thievery and as indirect contributors to the deterioration and ultimate failure of the profession of counseling and psychotherapy as a whole.
There are numerous strengths in this book, including Martin’s insistence that we as professionals attend to this topic and protect the vulnerable populations we treat. He lays out the larger debates in psychotherapy that include its very definition, as well as the educational and regulatory issues that encompass training and licensing, and takes great care and time in uncovering the many and varied “approaches” to treatment that professionals advertise on their personal websites, which he implores the reader to seriously and thoughtfully question and explore. Martin’s claim is timely, relevant, and bold, and though he takes the reader on a few detours, the strength of his argument lies within the larger debate about ideology-driven approaches, how we define the practice of psychotherapy as a counseling discipline and areas for improvement and reform.
The book opens with one such detour, a chapter titled “Kismetic Psychotherapy,” which Martin alerts the reader fairly quickly is not real. It is unclear, despite his reasoning at the end of the chapter, why he has created a fictional type of psychotherapy to illustrate his point that there are many types of psychotherapy that professionals advertise, which are overly individualized and essentially made up. He intersperses this material with a brief history of cognitive therapy and the lives of George Kelly and Carl Rogers, which though relevant, feels somewhat misplaced among his fictional psychotherapy depiction.
The meat of his argument comes in Chapters 2 and 3 titled “The Long Conversation About Counseling and Psychotherapy” and “21,758: The Scariest Number in the Psychotherapy World,” respectively. In these chapters, we learn more about the “long conversation” as he aptly describes it, which refers to “…the problematic issues in counseling and psychotherapy that have been evolving for many years” (p. 34), including issues of pseudoscience, competency, licensing, and most notable to the thrust of his critique, the ideologically driven nature of many counseling approaches. 21,758, we learn, is the number of different psychotherapy and counseling approaches Martin finds through his research that are listed online. His methodology includes identifying licensed counselors on a national scale through their online advertising, researching the accreditation status of their degree programs, and correlating this information with the number of different treatment approaches counselors in his sample advertised. His description of this process is meticulously detailed and yields a wealth of information regarding how many treatment approaches are advertised by counselors from accredited counseling programs (197) and unaccredited counseling programs (258), concluding that there is some connection between the nature of preparatory programs and the range of ideologically driven counseling approaches graduates advertise in practice.
In the book’s remaining chapters, Martin outlines observations, interpretations, and prescriptions for reform, including specific recommendations for preparatory programs, better regulation of practice, and a central code of ethics for mental health care providers that he proposes can and should be considered in understanding the data that he has presented. The applicability to social work practice is relevant in that as a profession, we must consider (and indeed, have had our own “long conversation” over) issues of preparatory programs, licensing, and regulations; ethics; and ideology that form the foundation of our practitioners’ knowledge and skill sets. Holden and Barker (2018) engage in such an inquiry, compiling an array of the many and varied “practices” that social workers advertise online, some of which, as in Martin’s text, should give us all pause. Potential audiences for this work include experienced practitioners and those engaged in research regarding the practice of counseling and psychotherapy.
