Читать книгу Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling - Kenneth S. Pope - Страница 68

Competence is hard to define. Licensing boards and civil courts sometimes specify defining criteria for areas of practice. More often, they require only that in whatever area of therapy and counseling the clinician is practicing, they should possess demonstrable competence. Demonstrable competence requires clinicians to produce evidence of their abilities. Usually this evidence comes from formal education, professional training, and supervised experience, followed by continuing education.

A competence requirement often appears in ethical, legal, and professional standards. Here are some examples:

 Section 1396, of California Title 16 states: “A psychologist shall not function outside his or her particular field or fields of competence as established by his or her education, training and experience.”

 Ethical Standard 2.01a of the APA’s “Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct” (2017a) states: “Psychologists provide services, teach, and conduct research with populations and in areas only within the boundaries of their competence, based on their education, training, supervised experience, consultation, study, or professional experience.”

 The Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists (CPA, 2017a) states that “psychologists recognize the need for competence and self-knowledge. They consider incompetent action to be unethical in itself, as it is unlikely to be of benefit and likely to be harmful. They engage only in those activities in which they have competence or for which they are receiving supervision, and they perform their activities as competently as possible” (p. 18).

 The American Counseling Association (2014) ACA Code of Ethics states: “Counselors practice only within the boundaries of their competence, based on their education, training, supervised experience, state and national professional credentials, and appropriate professional experience” (p. 8). It also states that “multicultural counseling competency is required across all counseling specialties” and that “counselors gain knowledge, personal awareness, sensitivity, dispositions, and skills pertinent to being a culturally competent counselor in working with a diverse client population” (p. 8).

 APA’s (2017a) Multicultural Guidelines: An Ecological Approach to Context, Identity, and Intersectionality states: “It is important to note that, for the purposes of the Multicultural Guidelines, cultural competence does not refer to a process that ends simply because the psychologist is deemed competent. Rather, cultural competence incorporates the role of cultural humility whereby cultural competence is considered a lifelong process of reflection and commitment” (Hook & Watkins, 2015; Waters & Asbill, 2013). This current iteration of the Multicultural Guidelines also recognizes the contributions of other culturally competent models of practice such as the American Counseling Association’s (ACA) Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies: Guidelines for the Counseling Profession (Ratts et al., 2016); the American Psychiatric Association’s Cultural Formulation Interview (American Psychiatric Association, 2013); and the Standards and Indicators for Cultural Competence in Social Work Practice (National Association of Social Workers, 2015, pp. 8–9).

The ethical requirement of competence recognizes that the therapist’s power and influence (see Chapter 5) should not be handled in a careless, ignorant, and thoughtless manner. The complex, hard-to-define nature of therapy tends to cloud why this requirement makes sense. It becomes clearer by analogy to other fields. A physician who is an internist or general practitioner may do excellent work, but would any of us want that physician to perform coronary surgery or neurosurgery on us if they did not have adequate education, training, and supervised experience in these forms of surgery? A skilled professor of linguistics may have a solid grasp of a variety of Indo-European languages and dialects but be completely unable to translate a Swahili text.