Happy opening ceremony day everyone.  I rang my school bell with many of my neighbours this morning to celebrate the countdown to the beginning.  It was a beautiful 3 minutes, shared across the country with many many people and car drivers tooting and ringing away.  It was beautiful for the soul and three minutes of connection at a very spiritual level.  Enjoy!

Thoughts from the Annual Institute of Psychotherapy and Disability Conference in Dublin, June 2012

I was lucky enough a couple of weeks ago to travel to the Annual IPD Conference in Dublin with a colleague from PFP&PC.  The conference was entitled What about me: Psychotherapeutic Applications to Disability.  Professor Nigel Beail presented the keynote address about setting up psychotherapy services for people with learning disabilities where he outlined the areas for consideration including the available outcome research and the importance of evaluating services to provide data to commissioners about the value of the service. 

After the break, we presented our paper “Providing Support within the Private sector: a UK experience” on behalf of Dr Pat Frankish, which described the development of our service model with case examples of the model in practice.  We were followed by Patty Van Belle-Krusse from the Netherlands, who described her project in Arduin which provided support to people with intellectual disabilities in an environment that is therapeutic. 

In the lunch break, Irish author Jack Harte read from his novel Reflections in a Tar-Barrel which tells the story of a man who is considered to be a “half-wit”; he also believes this to be true.  The story describes how he grapples with life and the spiritual and arrives at his own world view.  Harte uses a tragic humour in his story-telling, which characterised both the pain and wonder of hero’s journey.

Following lunch there were a series of parallel seminars, of which only two could be attended. I chose Angelina Veiga’s Who Framed Sigmund Freud? On protecting patient and therapist from attack and Grania Clarke’s Working with Systems within Systems: the value of systemic approaches in working with people with disabilities and the systems designed to support them. These two seminars reminded me of the huge variations in approaches to working with people with intellectual disabilities, and the vital importance of the presence of all of them as there are large variations in our clients and their needs will be different requiring different forms of therapy and support at different times.  Angelina’s psychoanalytical presentation raised the blocks to therapy that are even more damaging of the therapy for people with intellectual disabilities and the importance of the therapist to be aware of these attacks and be ready to address them.  Grania described the complexities in the systems of people with intellectual disabilities and the varied perspectives of individual’s within the system.  She used case examples to highlight the importance of using a systemic perspective in working with people with intellectual disabilities.

Well worth the whistle-stop tour!!



Statement of Equivalence (SoE) – the old fashioned way

As an Australian-trained Clinical Psychologist I began the SoE process in 2007, and, after four years was last year awarded Chartered status by the British Psychological Society (BPS) and registered by the Health Professions Council (HPC).  What a process!  It would have been quicker to undertake the doctoral program from beginning to end.

There are inherent difficulties in gaining the now defunct SoE and practitioner status via the international route with the HPC.  The biggest, yet most important, was, as an international applicant, circumnavigating the ‘system’ to find

a)     placements and supervisors in order to meet the required competencies

b)     a university to support you if you need to undertake doctoral level research

c)      an establishment that supports candidates through the process.

My experience has been “Well, this is what you need to do, go do it”, but without documented links to Trusts or private practices that are willing to take on overseas clinicians. 

Of greatest disappointment is the as yet unaddressed issue of candidates undertaking doctoral level research, being examined as if a doctoral final year student, but not getting the qualification at the end of it.  While equivalence was always the goal, surely the next step for the profession is recognition and reward for those candidates who complete this process?

Any thoughts from other SoE candidates or from those who applied to the HPC via the international route are welcome.