Academy for the study of the Psychoanalytic Arts Co-Sponsors Confidentiality Petition

from the Academy:

Academy Co-Sponsors Confidentiality Petition

Also in this issue: Reasons to Support the Petition on Confidentiality by Bernard McDowell, L.C.S.W.

In April 2004, the Board of the Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts voted to join the American Mental Health Alliance and the National Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers in sponsoring the Licensed Psychotherapists’ Confidentiality Petition. Privacy in the consulting room today is threatened with extinction due to decisions that have been and are being made by the federal government, corporate medicine, and the insurance industry. The purpose of this petition is to give voice to practicing professionals who uphold their ethical obligation to protect clients’ confidentiality because they know trust and privacy are essential elements of psychotherapy.

This petition campaign is one step toward a “registry” of professional opinion. The registry is the brainchild of Bernard McDowell, L.C.S.W., of Portland, Oregon. It is a strategy to reclaim the “healing arts” from government and corporate third-party payers and the pharmaceutical industry. McDowell argues that psychotherapy is a healing art and belongs to all people. As such, we must not allow it to be appropriated by federal and corporate bureaucrats who seek to set “standards” to be imposed on all psychotherapists and their clients—for example, HIPAA. A petition can make it clear that such “standards” are not universally accepted and that there is a significant body of professional opinion that opposes such practices as a violation of clients’ privacy and of their own ethical duty to maintain confidentiality.

We include here the text of the petition along with the article McDowell has written to explain his ideas about the registry of professional opinion and the importance of this petition drive.

If you find yourself in agreement with the contents of the petition, we urge you to join with us in supporting it.

To print a signable copy of the petition, go to www.academyprojects.org and click on Sign the Confidentiality Petition

Petition Text

Licensed Psychotherapists’ Petition on Confidentiality

To Whom It May Concern:

We, the undersigned psychotherapy professionals:

support client confidentiality as a fundamental principle of psychotherapy and as a basic right of our clients

object to the decline in protections for confidentiality under new federal regulation,

object to unquestioning adoption of corporate medicine’s standards of practice.

We therefore:

object to the idea that all records must be kept in a manner to be reviewed by third parties,

object to any standard requiring psychotherapists to give every client a diagnosis.

Such requirements provide little consumer protection or service, may stigmatize people, prevent people from seeking treatment or obtaining insurance in the future, unnecessarily invade privacy, and compromise patient trust.

When a psychotherapist and a client both agree, it is appropriate (1) for the therapist to keep no records at all of the therapy process or to keep them under a pseudonym and/or (2) for a therapist to forgo giving the client a diagnosis.

This petition is not intended to circumvent laws that require report of threats to human safety.