A title tells you less than you think

How we work

Why the landscape matters more than a claim

In the United Kingdom, psychology is regulated by title rather than by activity. A defined set of titles is protected in law and may be used only by a person on the statutory register: practitioner psychologist, registered psychologist, and the specific titles for clinical, counselling, educational, forensic, health, occupational, and sport and exercise psychology. Using one of those without registration is a criminal offence, which is a serious sanction and reflects that each title corresponds to a defined route of training and supervised practice. What the system does not do is reserve the underlying activity, and it does not reserve the general word.

The consequence is the part people are rarely told. Psychologist, used on its own, is not a protected title. Anybody may lawfully describe themselves that way. Psychotherapist and counsellor are not protected either, although accredited voluntary registers exist for both and membership of one tells you something genuine about training and accountability. A designation conferred by a learned society is a professional body's designation rather than statutory regulation. None of this means that an unregistered practitioner is unsuitable or that valuable work is not done under unprotected titles, because plenty is. It means that a title on a website carries far less information than a reader naturally assumes, and that the only way to resolve it is to note the exact wording used and look it up on the relevant public register. That takes about a minute and is worth doing for anyone, including for this practice, whose registration appears on the legal page rather than being implied by the company name.

The second thing that belongs near the front concerns confidentiality, because the expectation people arrive with is usually borrowed from a different profession. A lawyer's professional privilege is close to absolute. Confidentiality in psychological work is not. Its limits include circumstances where there is a serious risk of harm to the client or to another person, where there are concerns about the safety of a child or an adult at risk, and where disclosure is required by a court or otherwise by law. Those limits are real and they are not unusual, but they must be explained before any substantive work begins rather than raised at the moment they operate, because somebody deciding what to disclose is entitled to know the boundaries first. Two further limits belong with it: coaching and consultancy are not therapy and are not presented as such, and this is not a crisis service.