By Nathan Beel 2024
Are we one profession or two (or more)? The Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA) suggests a single profession composed of psychotherapists and counsellors. It states “The Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA) is a leading national peak body for the counselling and psychotherapy profession [singular]” (PACFA, n.d.).
Gale (2024) disagreed with PACFA’s own statement and proposed that psychotherapy and counselling are actually distinct professions. However, I doubt even Gale would have been expecting the latest statement from PACFA’s official training standards, about to come into effect in 2025, which has now expanded the number of professions it hosts. In its most recent training standards, it states “… the professions [plural] of Psychotherapist, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Healing Practitioner, Creative and Experiential Therapist, and Relationship Counsellor” (PACFA, 2024, p. 9). The number of professions under the PACFA umbrella is rapidly expanding. The basis seems connected with the specialist Colleges.
PACFA is still showing some restraint, however. The identities of Supervisors (who also have their own College) and Mental Health Practitioners (who appear to be fading into obscurity) missed out on getting their own professions recognised. Perhaps next time.
A concern I have is that if PACFA keeps picking up professions, at some point these new professions may start demanding to be included in PACFA’s name. If PACFA were truly inclusive of all its professions, it should rename its acronym to its current listing – PCAATSIHPCAETRFA. Or shortened to PACFA+! Or rename PACFA the Multi-Profession Federation of Australia or MPFA.
Things are refreshingly simpler in the Australian Counselling Association. As its name implies, it represents only one profession – that of counselling. However, this is not entirely accurate. On its About page, it states “The Australian Counselling Association (ACA) … uphold[s] high standards in counselling and psychotherapy” (ACA, 2024). The draft National standards for counsellors and psychotherapists, created by Allen + Clarke Consulting (2024), do not differentiate between the two in the standards, naming them both in the document title, aligning with ACA’s view of one profession with two identities.
The Australian Registry of Counsellors & Psychotherapists (ARCAP which lists ACA and PACFA practitioners) lists only two identities in its name but includes a category for Mental Health Practitioners. Unlike Supervisors and the remaining ‘professions’ in the PACFA training standards, this group is recognised on the ARCAP register.
Ultimately, the question remains: Is there one profession with two identities, as ACA implies (and likewise PACFA did previously and currently), or an ever-growing number of professions as evidenced in PACFA’s most recent training standards?
This post is admittedly cheeky, and is poking fun at PACFA for what I suspect is merely a confusing wording and nothing more (and I suspect it will be amended after this post). I apologise if this blog post triggers outrage.
On a more serious note, however, I think as a profession we need to be consistent and maintain a single core identity aligned with the baseline training standards, which essentially are targeted at counsellor preparation in all the existing core training standards to date. I think the ACA (Australian or American version) title emphasising counselling without adding additional identities to the name, is the simplest and easiest to brand the profession to the public and other stakeholders. My opinion is that we should aim for a single professional identity baseline and be consistent with this in our terminology, similar to the psychology profession, while we can still recognise secondary specialist identities (Beel, 2024). However, I know that the UK has the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, listing one profession expressed as dual identities. And I fear I’ve missed the train on this in Australia by over two decades!
Hopefully, the Australian profession(s?) can achieve a unified position and terminology consistent across both peak bodies, particularly around what appears to be sub-identities. Otherwise, we risk confusing the public and other stakeholders. We also risk confusing ourselves and our own documentation, leading to mischievous blog posts such as this. Are we the counselling profession, the counselling and psychotherapy profession, or something else? I prefer the first, the overall evidence unfortunately suggests the second, and the wording of the latest training standards hints at something else altogether!
References
ACA. (2024). About the ACA. https://theaca.net.au/about-us/
Allen + Clarke Consulting. (2024). National standards for counsellors and psychotherapists: Draft for consultation November 2024. https://consultations.health.gov.au/mental-health-access-branch/get-involved-review-draft-national-standards-for-c/
Beel, N. (2024). The Australian counselling profession in 2030: A counsellor / counsellor educator’s perspective. Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.59158/001c.94532
Gale, J. (2024). Preserving the integrity of psychotherapy: Let’s not throw it under the bus. Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.59158/001c.116673
PACFA. (2024). Accreditation standards for counselling programs (1.0 ed.). Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia.
PACFA. (n.d.). About. Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia. https://pacfa.org.au/portal/portal/About/About.aspx?hkey=f3b035e3-3496-4943-b03a-bc89490b7a71