There was a very amusing article on BBC the other day. It was about George the cat, which has been registered as a hypnotherapist with three relevant professional bodies in the UK. According to what BBC wrote, the bodies accepted credentials which were a bit dodgy –to use an understatement– such as a certificate from the "Society of Certified Advanced Mind Therapists".

Of course, such a Society does not exist, but some of the British bodies that represent Neuro-Linguistic Programmers and Hypnotherapists do not seem to run rigorous checks on their prospective registrants. This allowed Chris Jackson, presenter of "Inside Out" in the North East and Cumbria, to register George.

That’s pretty embarrassing, to say the least.

I have argued from this blog quite extensively against the drive to regulate talking therapies by the Health Professions Council (see for example here and here), and news items like this do not help my argument at all, one would think.

It is true that is difficult to avoid one conclusion: If Hypnotherapists and Neuro-linguistic Programmers do not bother checking the credentials of their prospective members, why should we trust them that they bother learning their craft in the first place?

But from this I would hesitate to jump to the further conclusion, that if these bodies cannot regulate themselves, someone will have to do it them –namely the HPC.

This would be tantamount to say that because people who have committed crimes do sometimes claim their innocence, all people who claim their innocence can and should be treated as suspects.

Ok, it’s not exactly the same, but you get the idea. After all, the three duped organizations do not seem to be participating in any self-regulating scheme at all. Looking at their websites, I failed to find any evidence of that.

So, it doesn’t seem to be a question of inadequate self-regulation; rather it is a question of absence of any regulation altogether.

Nobody wants that.