Читать книгу Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling - Kenneth S. Pope - Страница 70

Intellectual competence involves one’s fund of knowledge or “knowing about.” In our graduate training, internships, supervised experience, continuing education, and other contexts, we learn about the research, theories, interventions, and other topics that we need to do our work. We learn to question the information and assess its validity and relevance for different situations and populations. We learn to create and test hypotheses about assessment and interventions. We find ways to keep up with the latest therapy research.

Part of intellectual competence is learning which clinical approaches, strategies, or techniques show evidence or promise of effectiveness and for whom do such techiques work. If clinical methods are to avoid charlatanism, hucksterism, and well-meaning ineffectiveness, they must work (at least some of the time). The practitioner’s supposed competence means little if their methods lack competence. In his provocative article The Scientific Basis of Psychotherapeutic Practice: A Question of Values and Ethics, Jerry Singer (1980) emphasized the ethical responsibilities of clinicians keeping up with the emerging research basis of the methods they use.

Intellectual competence also means learning what approaches have been shown to be invalid or perhaps even harmful. George Stricker (1992) wrote:

Although it may not be unethical to practice in the absence of knowledge, it is unethical to practice in the face of knowledge. We all must labor with the absence of affirmative data, but there is no excuse for ignoring contradictory data (p. 544).

Intellectual competence is not frozen in time. David Barlow showed how quickly well-designed research can change our views of which interventions are effective, worthless, or even detrimental. “Stunning developments in health care have occurred during the last several years. Widely accepted health-care strategies have been brought into question by research evidence as not only lacking benefit but also, perhaps, as inducing harm” (Barlow, 2004, p. 869; see also Sue, 2015).

Intellectual competence also means admitting what we do not know. We may know about depression in adults but not depression in kids. We may be familiar with the culture of one Asian population but not others. We may understand the degree to which the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) can assess malingering among criminal defendants but not whether it can identify leadership strengths among job candidates in the tech industry.

Intellectual competence also involves knowing how to do certain clinical tasks. We gain this kind of competence, the development of skills, through carefully supervised experience. We can’t learn how to do therapy just by reading a book or sitting in a classroom; therapy is a set of skills that is learned through practice. The APA Ethics Code Standard 2.01c (APA, 2017a) encourages properly trained psychologists planning to provide services new to them to achieve competence in those new services through relevant education, training, supervised experience, consultation, or study. Both the APA Ethics Code (Standard 2.03) and the CPA’s Ethics Code (Standards IV.3 and IV.4) recognize that knowledge becomes obsolete and that psychologists don’t stop developing and maintaining competence when they become licensed.