Impaired Therapists

Curt and Katie talk about therapists who become impaired – by substance abuse, cognitive decline, their own mental health concerns, burnout, etc. The challenges of addressing impaired therapists given the ethics codes, the lack of effective means to make complaints, and the difficulty in finding effective solutions.

It’s time to reimagine therapy and what it means to be a therapist. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy talk about how to approach the role of therapist in the modern age.

In this episode we talk about what makes a therapist impaired and what you can do about it:

“I think that if someone could actually approach a colleague, friend, someone they know well, and identify to them ‘Hey, I’m seeing this go on. Are you okay?’ Even just lending an ear, a shoulder, a helping hand…And coming from a place of care, I think it can be accepted if you’re coming from a place of hey, I’m here for you. I want to spend time with you, or I want to support you, or consult or whatever. It’s when you come at them and say, Hey, I think you’re impaired. You really shouldn’t be seeing clients [that it becomes difficult].” – Katie Vernoy, LMFT

• The definition of Impaired Therapist
• The lack of recent research on the topic
• The types of impairment: substance abuse, cognitive decline, mental health concerns, burnout
• Why and how therapists can become impaired
• Looking at how therapists are more likely to have these impairments
• The responsibilities and challenges of observing impairment of others (especially depending on the role, supervisor, supervisee, colleague)
• The ethical responsibility to pay attention to your own potential impairment
• The challenge of making a complaint related to an impaired therapist
• Looking at the ethics code, with the responsibility to approach impaired colleague first
• How the interaction in the Facebook groups is not necessarily taking care of this responsibility well.
• The harm of shaming therapists – and the importance of supporting each other
• The impact of the power differential on having these difficult conversations
• The negative impacts on clients and treatment team members from impaired therapists
• What is the difference between impaired therapists and bad therapy?
• The importance of the response and introspection related to impairment
• What we’re supposed to do when we identify an impaired colleague, supervisor, or supervisee
• Who are the gatekeepers? Why is it important?
• A strange foray into the thoughts on vigilante therapists and the #cardigancartel

“According to our ethics codes our job is to bring it up to the colleague themselves, or the supervisee or the supervisor, whoever it might be, and if it’s not followed through on, then your job is to report it with supporting documentation that you’ve reached out to this person or persons that you then bring it to the Ethics Committee, and they then make their decisions. – Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Resources mentioned on this episode of the podcast:

We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode and put together some handy-dandy links.

Psychology Today: Why Shrinks Have Problems

APA Article – Self-care and intervening with impairment

Ethics of Burnout

APA: Ethics related to an impaired colleague

Very Bad Therapy Podcast

Relevant Episodes of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide:

When Clients Die

That’s Unethical

Haters and Trolls

Meet the Hosts: Curt Widhalm & Katie Vernoy

Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Curt Widhalm is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is a Board Member at Large for the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, a Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, Adjunct Faculty at Pepperdine University, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com

Katie Vernoy, LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant. As a helping professional for two decades, she’s navigated the ups and downs of our unique line of work. She’s run her own solo therapy practice, designed innovative clinical programs, built and managed large, thriving teams of service providers, and consulted hundreds of helping professionals on how to build meaningful AND sustainable practices. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com

A Quick Note:

Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.

Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.

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Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:

Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/

Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):

Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements)

… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)

Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings to support you as a whole person and a therapist. Here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm And Katie Vernoy.

Curt Widhalm 0:12
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy And thank you for being a listener. Wherever you listen, if you wouldn’t mind, doing us a favor, stop by there, leave us rating and review. It definitely helps us out. And today’s episode we’re talking about when therapists are impaired and what we should do about it, and where kind of our guidance is, and in doing some research for this article, we kind of came across a bunch of older articles that are probably 20 plus years old at this point. Some of the stuff that we came across is a little bit newer, but this is something that doesn’t seem to be talked about in the research a whole lot, at least as far as recently goes. Katie and I decided that we would be the new resource for what to do when impairment comes up with your colleagues and those around you.

Katie Vernoy 1:13
Or yourself.

Curt Widhalm 1:13
Or yourself.

Katie Vernoy 1:14
So I think we should start with what an impaired therapist is, because I think there’s a lot of different ways that therapists can be impaired.

Curt Widhalm 1:21
So I think the easy ones, and we’ll just kind of rattle off a list of these, so that way it’s common knowledge: people who are actively impaired by substances, in the throes of addiction that affects their clients. Neurocognitive decline is something that I’ve seen kind of pop up recently. People are just overwhelmed by maybe their own mental health issues that is not allowing them to perform, even burnout.

Katie Vernoy 1:52
Yeah, yeah. I was looking at some articles, and we’ll put a bevy of articles in the show notes, so you can take a look at this stuff. And this was actually an article from Psychology Today from 1997 that was reviewed in 2016 so apparently it’s still up to date, but talking about some of these other things, and potentially even issues with clients, we had an episode this year on clients who die by suicide or clients who die. And so that can also be something that can impact us in our feelings of efficacy as therapists. There’s a lot of times that we could potentially become impaired, whether it’s burnout, our own mental health concerns, things that are actively happening in the therapy room. And when this happens, patients could be negatively impacted. We don’t provide as high level of care as we would normally. And I think this article that I was mentioning in Psychology Today, kinds of kind of talks about how therapists or psychologists, or those of us who are practicing in this field and psychiatrists may have more of a likelihood of these types of impairments than the the society at large, because there’s, you know, kind of the wounded healer, there’s the stuff that we deal with on a day to day basis, the isolation that can come from being a therapist, that we actually are more at risk of having these types of mental health concerns and impairment. And so we have to be very aware that even though we have these extra tools, we have resilience and coping strategies and that kind of stuff, if we don’t use them, we can become impaired and really do some some harm to our clients.

Curt Widhalm 3:34
So what we’re hoping to accomplish in this episode is looking at not only the ways that people can be impaired, and our responsibility in stepping up to that, but also in the really wide variety of places that this can happen. I know that I’ve traditionally been involved in these discussions in my roles as a supervisor or as an educator, and those relationships have a very power defined hierarchy to them, supervisor, supervisee, educator, student, that those institutions really do offer a much more clear path to some of the gate keeping challenges of people entering into the profession and being able to identify when there are impairments, whether it’s some of the things that we listed before, whether it’s job and profession related things like getting case notes done on time and being truthful about billing, or even just truthful about tracking their hours towards licensure, those situations do have that already built in, and that by far, is not the only situations where we observe impaired colleagues. Yhat this might also be other people within your agency. It might be people in another practice that you’re seeing behaviors exhibited by them that they’re very likely going to impact their clients. There’s also a number of people that I’ve come across during my career who are faced with potential whistleblowing situations where it’s people above them or the agency itself that are serving to impair client progress. And we’re hoping to kind of talk through a lot of these nuances in our format here today, but we’re probably not going to get that to them all. These are all areas that you should at least consider.

Katie Vernoy 3:34
One of the things that you did not mention, but I want to make sure that we also address is the responsibility of therapists to pay attention to their own level of efficacy or functioning and identify themselves when they are impaired. And so I want to talk both from if you’re observing it in others, as well as what you’re seeing in yourself, so that that people feel very empowered either way, to be able to make sure as therapists, that we’re functioning at the highest level. Because I think for myself, I’ve identified times when I’m sick or when I’ve had a personal loss, or when I’m extremely overwhelmed and need a mental health day, for example. And there’s been times when I’ve gone in and tried to do therapy, and it just did not happen well. And I, you know, took that and processed it and used it, you know, the repair as part of the work with the client. You know, we become concerned when it’s an ongoing thing, but I think that there are times, especially with and we see this in the disciplinary actions, that if therapists are actively in addiction, or if they’re so personally overwhelmed, they may not see it in themselves. And so I think we do need to kind of look at, what are the what are the ways that we identify within ourselves? It may be a little bit easier or a little bit harder, depending on the ways in which we’re impaired and the ways in which we identified in others. Because I think for me, the time, the times when I’ve heard about it in others are either clients, the new clients coming in and saying, my old therapist did this, and this is why I left. And then I also think that there’s times when it with my colleagues, I’ve had worrisome interactions, or things that I’ve seen, or other colleagues saying, I’m really worried about this person. What do we do about this person? You know, and there’s not necessarily specific evidence that they’re impaired in session, but it is something where we’re seeing behavior that really throws up some red flags. And so to me, I feel like from the beginning, when you’re talking about kind of supervisors and the gatekeeping role, as well as education and that kind of stuff, I think that it needs to be a huge part, and I think this is something that we address in the work that we’re doing, that we really need to have this self work and this self awareness built in. So not only do supervisors and educators keep a keen eye on what’s happening, but also therapists themselves, whether they’re brand spanking new or been in the field for 30 years, have the ability to really assess, am I this, this is the weird phrase to use, but am I fit for duty, so to speak.

Curt Widhalm 5:30
What are the gatekeeping discussions become really around? What can we do? And outside of those traditional power hierarchies that I described a little bit earlier, is kind of this void of direction that in various aspects of my career, I’ve approached the licensing board here in California about some questionable concerns that I have of other people in the field, and the response has largely been, if you’re not a client of theirs and you’re not harmed by it, then there’s not a whole lot that we can do in taking on this kind of a complaint. And the other direction that we look at is from our ethics codes, which, as far as I’m aware, all of the major ethics codes direct us to approach the impaired colleague first. And if we’re not already risk averse enough as therapists, in being challenging outside of what our defined role as a therapist is to our clients, it’s really difficult to go to people and say, Hey, I think what you’re doing is potentially harmful, and I imagine that most of those discussions are not going to be met with, hey, you know what? I’m going to self reflect right now and totally agree with you change things right away. So this is, you know, really a part of navigating the ethics code in a way that is really difficult, because if the expectation is for us to not police each other is not quite the right word, but it’s to hold each other accountable.

Katie Vernoy 9:44
Or take care of each other.

Curt Widhalm 9:49
Then it’s something where, if it’s a close friend or colleague, they might listen to you a lot more easily. If you, you don’t walk that line super deftly, then I don’t expect that that initial response is always going to be fairly accepted. And the way that I look at this is my favorite thing to rail on lately is therapist Facebook groups, when somebody gets called out for doing something that the response is usually not in kind of a good positive space. It becomes super defensive. Now, part of this is the way that, unfortunately, so many of us have been behaving online and just kind of jumping to hey, that’s unethical, or really just getting into haters and trolls, and we’ll link to our past episodes. But part of this is okay, we have to be confident enough to identify it, to be able to approach somebody else about it and deliver that message in a way that’s likely going to be responding, which I expect to happen at about less than 1% of the time.

… 11:02
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Katie Vernoy 11:03
I feel a little bit more hopeful than that, but I don’t I think that if someone could actually approach a colleague, friend, someone they know well, and identify to them. Hey, I’m seeing this go on. Are you okay? Even just lending an ear, a shoulder, a helping hand, whatever, and identifying for them. Hey, I noticed that you’re really having trouble getting out of bed. You know, you’ve canceled all of our coffee dates, blah, blah. How are you doing? And coming from a place of care, I think it can be accepted if you’re coming from a place of hey, I’m here for you. I want to spend time with you, or I want to support you, or consult or whatever. It’s when you come at them and say, Hey, I think you’re impaired. You really shouldn’t be seeing clients. And I think when you mentioned the Facebook groups, I think that’s part of what happens, is that there’s this assumption, there’s a public shaming, there’s a calling out, and I think there are times when that’s needed, and I this is not the place for that conversation, and I think there’s times when that’s harmful. And so I think, to me, I feel more hopeful that if we have a strong community of clinicians around us, that and I would hope my community of clinicians would call me out as well. But if, if you’re seeing your colleagues, the people that you spend some time with, having struggling personally, that that becomes part of the conversation, and it’s acceptable. I think the thing that I saw in the article that I was reading about, like, Why does shrinks, you know, what’s wrong with shrinks or something? What I saw was that there is a stigma for therapists going into therapy, that there is a shame and an embarrassment. I should know better than this. There’s not an acceptance of therapists as human beings who have most likely had some sort of childhood trauma or some sort of some sort of wounding that’s that’s led them to be very called into the profession that are dealing with really hard stuff on a day to day basis. And so to me, I feel like there’s a there’s also and in the ish, in the episode with Debbie Frankel, she was talking about how when our clients die by suicide, we feel ashamed and we don’t share, and so we’re stuck in these tiny bubbles where we’re supposed to be okay. And so I think part of it is as a society, is we do want to take care of each other, but I think about these other situations where it may be a colleague that no longer is friendly with you, it may be someone you have no idea who they are, and I feel very uncomfortable approaching someone like, hey, you know that client that left? Well, they’re my client now, and they said that you’re doing some crazy stuff and you need to, like, check yourself. Like that feels really uncomfortable to me. Obviously, I wouldn’t say it that way, but it’s like that feels, that responsibility feels a bit onerous. Certainly, I could encourage the client to make a complaint to the appropriate board. There’s, there’s ways that I could support that happening, but that part feels a little bit weird to me, like, like, if I, if I saw you Curt having some issues. And I was like, Hey, this is going to start impacting this client. I would reach out and I would I would talk with you about it, not necessarily like, hey dude, you’re messed up, but like, let’s let me provide support. But if I didn’t know you, I wouldn’t want to approach you with that.

Curt Widhalm 14:32
I’m speaking of the power dynamics too. Is that as Katie and I have become more involved in kind of the therapist profession, and risen up through, you know, the ranks of our association. And just some of the projects that we do is we come into contact with a lot of people, and we definitely see, you know, the projects that we’re going on, we have our reputations that we try to manage. And are very sensitive, even with kind of the quote, unquote, power that we might have here in the Southern California area, of just how hard it is to have these difficult conversations with people that we might rightfully identify as being impaired, just because the reaction could be such a backlash against us in a public way that we’re not even immune to this. And this is something where, even if you are coming up in the field, and this is speaking to early career therapists of how difficult it is to look at what your career could be. And if you are feeling that you know somebody is doing something that’s either unethical or, you know, actually impaired and damaging to clients, of how difficult it is to make that step to speak up, because you don’t want to be identified in that negative space, much in the same way that Katie and I do.

Katie Vernoy 15:59
Yeah, and I’m just thinking as well about impaired supervisors and therapists who are identifying or kind of new therapists identifying my supervisor is not okay and and what that looks like, and how hard that is to call out. I think there’s so much where this work is critical, it’s challenging, it’s sometimes life or death. It’s certainly sometimes steeped in crisis and risk. And some of these decisions can feel very overwhelming, and then when you add on top of that, you don’t know if the advice you’re getting is sound. You’re being treated horribly by a supervisor or whatever. You don’t know that your colleague is going to be there for you when you’re going out on a home visit or whatever like. There’s a lot of times when adding an impaired therapist or an impaired supervisor to the mix can just make things terrifying.

Curt Widhalm 17:01
And I’ll bring up this point, and I have to actually credit Katie for having this idea, but I think that this is the point where we also need to delineate what is impairment versus what is just bad therapy, or what is bad supervision and unskilled because there there is a difference between those two. Impairment is really where somebody is because of whatever situation is going on, is not able to fully be effective with clients, is potentially harming them in a way that requires them to step out of the practice and to potentially go on on leave or to have kind of a major intervention, whereas bad therapy or bad supervision is a skill set difference, it’s something that requires either needing to learn, needing to practice new skills, go through some sort of training about feedback informed treatment, or something along those lines. There’s a difference between impairment and bad therapy. Really bad therapy is an impairment if you’re actually harming people, and licensing boards and ethics committees will treat it that way and say you need to have a supervised practice in order to do this. But I think it’s really important to be able to also make that decision is, is this bad therapy somebody who wasn’t trained well enough, or is this an actual impairment that is something that’s getting in the way? And I’ve supervised people before who’ve had impaired other supervisors who talk about, you know, hey, we’re four months into supervision, and my supervisor doesn’t know my name. And it’s not for lack of reminding them, it’s they just can’t remember any details about me.

Katie Vernoy 18:55
Wow, yeah, before we get into that, I want to respond to what you had said just previously, which is this kind of bad therapy versus impaired therapy. I think it’s hard to distinguish, because is someone impaired, if they’re racist, or is that just bad therapy? I mean, like, there’s, there’s pieces to this where, you know, if they’ve not done their clinical work, and they’re still really, you know, emotionally dysregulated during a therapy session, is that bad therapy or is an impaired therapy? I mean, I think, to me, there’s, there’s a huge overlap between bad therapy and impaired therapy, because I think there are some folks who may not be able to use all of the skills that they’ve learned because they’re so burned out or overwhelmed or barely getting by financially, and are terrified they’re going to lose their job. Like I think there’s, there’s pieces of this where it’s it could be both. It could be one or the other. And I guess the question I have is, does it matter, which one it is?

Curt Widhalm 20:02
To use the racist question as an example, I think that you know, this is where it’s everybody’s favorite answer in therapy. It depends. I mean, there’s things that are obviously going to be to fall on one side of the line. There’s things are going to fall on the other side of the line, and racism is just going to be, you know, the placeholder in this discussion. Because this could be just about anything, but that there’s a whole wide swath in the middle that’s going to fall on one side to the listener and the perceiver, and is going to be just totally not paid attention to by a bunch of other people. And I think in the overall answer to this, it’s almost looking at what the consequence is. I guess I’m outing myself as a consequentialist in philosophical terms. But it’s if somebody calls a therapist out and says, Hey, that’s that’s racist because of X, Y and Z, and the therapist responds in an appropriate way. That’s bad therapy getting better. If it’s something where there’s, you know, just kind of this, I have an incapability of seeing your viewpoints and am doubling down on why I said what I did, and refusing to acknowledge that there’s any other way that could be an impairment, that could be something that is just bad therapy. But it’s to me, it’s that willingness to look at what the, what the infraction is, and how the response to it is that can really help delineate it, and that might be part of answering my concern at the beginning of the episode of You know, where the ethics code directs us, there is like, hey, if I can bring this up and somebody changes it, then we’re both doing our job as far as the ethics code goes. But if they’re not responding, that’s where this fits in.

Katie Vernoy 21:57
Yeah, and I think that’s a good distinction, whether or not it’s the semantics anybody else would use, I think bad therapy is something that someone could be trained not to do; more education, potentially their own work, but once it if it gets into their own work, then I think that can speak more to impaired therapy. But bad therapy is something that is a skill set, and impaired therapy is something where there potentially could be insight and they recognize I’m impaired, and they go fix it, or it could be something that’s intractable, and they double down. So there’s a lot of different ways. I mean, I’m trying to simplify it, just to kind of get my hands around, like, what is the definition we’re looking at. But if we throw away bad therapy, not that, not the very bad therapy podcast, that’s an excellent one to talk…

Curt Widhalm 22:47
Oh yeah.

Katie Vernoy 22:47
I think, we got to…

Curt Widhalm 22:48
If you’re not listening to them yet…

Katie Vernoy 22:50
You got to be listening to them. But if we look at impaired therapy, I think there are folks that are going to recognize pretty quickly. Yeah, I’m really having a tough time, whether it’s a divorce or a death or, you know, like a loss of a client, or whatever it is, like, yes, thank you for pointing that out to me. I’m going to take some time off and I’m going to get my head right, and then I’m going to, you know, kind of make sure I’m in consultation and in my own therapy when I return back to doing the work, because I’m identifying myself, and I appreciate you coming forward and saying that. And for you, you think that’s about 1% of the time. I don’t know what the percentages are. I hope that there’s people having the consultation groups around them that they would be responsive to that. But when we go to these folks who potentially don’t see it and don’t agree or feel very threatened by this idea that they are not fit to practice, either in the moment or anymore, if we’re talking about cognitive decline and some of the things that are kind of more permanent, so to speak. How do we identify when it’s actually impaired? And I will claim, I will credit you, with this idea of where’s the line. How do we identify this is actually impaired and needs to be addressed? How do we identify when we need to step forward and make a complaint or try to do something official, which sounds like may not even actually do anything, and what truly is our responsibility to that therapist, to their clients, to the profession, like, what do we actually take on here? Because I feel like I want to make sure I’m keeping my side of the street clean, that I’m doing my work, that I make sure that I am aware of of my own capabilities, as to the best of my ability. But if someone else is doing harm, what’s my role? How do I identify that it’s actually harm like what do I do?

… 24:44
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Curt Widhalm 24:45
According to our ethics codes? Our job is to bring it up to the colleague themselves, or the supervisee or the supervisor, whoever it might be, and if it’s not followed through on, then your job is to report it with supporting documentation that you’ve reached out to this person or persons that you then bring it to the Ethics Committee, and they then make their decisions.

Katie Vernoy 25:09
Or to the board, right?

Curt Widhalm 25:11
So the board has a little bit different stance on this, and in 2018 Stephen Frankel did a presentation for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences on neurocognitive decline in essentially older therapists, and what the licensing board’s responsibility is in intervening before client harm actually happens. And my understanding of the resulting discussion is that the board at the time, said that until there’s actually client harm, that the board can’t tell people to stop practicing. And so this is at least the way that our board is structured here in California, is that this is a Consumer Protection Board, and without actual harm being done, then the person is free to practice. And kind of taking this, we’ll set the rules and we’ll enforce the rules, but until the rules are actually broken and it’s causing harm, we can’t step in and say, well, you’re deemed fit to practice and you’re not even though things might be very, very similar between the two of you. So as we look at your question, what we can do is we can raise our concerns, and we can do that in the one on one way. We can bring our concerns as professionals to whatever ethics committees are necessary. But it doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot of gatekeeping power that we have, unless we’re in one of those supervisory positions or one of those educator positions early on in somebody’s career, and this keeping our side of the street clean. I don’t know that that’s necessarily enough, because when we look at the way that therapists are already perceived is when one of us acts poorly, it reflects badly on all of us.

Katie Vernoy 27:05
Yeah.

Curt Widhalm 27:05
And this is, you know, something where, you know, you see a therapist portrayed poorly in in a movie or TV show, just as a plot point. And you know, something that helps speed up the storyline is people can and do take on that as a identifying factor of what our reputations as therapists are, even when we are doing everything that we can to be legal and ethical in our practices.

Katie Vernoy 27:32
I do agree that if we are wanting to Have our profession reflect positively and to make sure that that we’re continuing the work of decreasing mental health stigma, increasing access and the perceived benefit from therapy, that that we want to make sure we’re doing what we can. It just feels very hopeless, because with the consumer protections, they’re not protecting against these impaired therapists like there’s there’s very little unless someone gets arrested for DUI or shoplifting or some sort of violence against people in their lives or actually doing something for a client, then the Board of Behavioral Sciences will step in. But when we’re looking at some of the more nuanced things that may not show up in legal action, or those kinds of things like cognitive decline, mental health concerns with a therapist earlier in their career, or whatever like, it doesn’t sound like there’s really any real recourse that would actually have a big impact and and protect clients, which it seems like it seems like a missing piece.

Curt Widhalm 28:40
So if we look historically at what is done when law and order isn’t being done by the governing areas, really what you’re speaking to is that we need to create vigilante bands of therapists to go around enforcing…

Katie Vernoy 28:59
Vigilante bands. What would we do as vigilante bands?

Curt Widhalm 29:03
We can go back to, you know, the therapist cartels in our cardigan cartels.

Katie Vernoy 29:10
So what are the vigilante cardigan cartel members gonna do?

Curt Widhalm 29:13
Force people to stop practicing? I don’t know. This is very obviously a joke, but all of this comes down to really being engaging other therapists and engaging them in really good education about what good therapy is, about what their ethical responsibilities are. At the end of the day, so much of what we do is based on our own self assessment abilities, and we lose some of those abilities if we’re not fully paying attention to them, not fully working on them. And some of the discussions with even Scott Miller about how to make the feedback informed treatment and getting therapists to look at themselves a more widespread practice. Even he said that this kind of involves people wanting to do this, not something that we can necessarily mandate or force out of CEUs. And CEUs not the most effective way of getting people to do things either.

Katie Vernoy 30:21
Nope.

Curt Widhalm 30:22
But I don’t think that there’s anything that we can do to actually force people, and that’s where our holding each other accountable is really where therapists are going to be impaired, they’re going to make mistakes. It’s going to harm people, and we have to be there ready to step in when that happens and we can’t, we’re not Minority Report, where we can pre cog our way into, okay, in some future date you’re going to do this thing, and until we are Minority Report, then we’re kind of in the system that it’s not perfect, And we do have some mechanisms in place to address it when it happens.

Katie Vernoy 31:05
I’m just thinking about the reputation that happens. I mean, if we think about the problem taking care of itself, a therapist whose abilities are declining, you know, whether it’s cognitive decline or alcoholism or mental health concerns or whatever, that colleagues start talking, clients start talking. And it does seem like there’s a piece of this that it does take care of itself a little bit, but my hope is that we can, as a profession, and as all of us modern therapists, commit to our own personal work or consultation to make sure that we’re doing what we need to do to be able to identify when, not if, but when we are impaired, so that we don’t harm our clients, and that we do step back and get the support, the help, the perspective that we need.

Curt Widhalm 32:04
You can add in your two cents on this and join us in our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group. You can also check out our show notes at mtsgpodcast.com, and check out all of the wonderful things that Katie and I are doing, and until next time, thanks for listening, and I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy.

… 32:26
(Adverttisement Break)

Announcer 32:26
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