Note: Cross posted from [wp angelfury] Family 'Lawless' Court Whores.

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Reason number 6048;

Well, why listen to women victims at all when you have all these nifty assessment tools?

You will find your answer in the legislative lobbying of decades ago that set up psych licensing and decided to limit access to the "tests". You will find lobbying by test publishers and trade organizations. Self-regulation and licensing of psychology was not done for the protection of the public. That's a ruse.

There isn't even, save for the administering of "assessment tools" any workable legal definition of what does or does not constitute psychology. Consider all the newer additional "counseling" fields they keep licensing. It's like trying to hold jello in your fist.

For decades, psychs were licensed and anyone and everyone could hang out a shingle and offer all kinds of counseling's and therapies with various educations, like social work and theology. They still can. So the psych trade protection lobbies went after and succeeded in licensing mental health counseling by that name, and marriage and family therapists, see how life coaches and spiritual advisors have sprung up.

The game is: figure out how to sell your friendship for hire plus advice using different words for what you do. Can't license TALK or control who people talk to. It's inane. But the psych trade orgs did it for the protection of psychology.

So the licensing schemes are an attempt to elevate the mental health "fields" for marketing purposes. It started with applied psychology. Psychiatrists never needed this; they are actual physicians. But then psychologists did. The word games and machinations of the licensing scheme parallels much of the rest of what they do, e.g. DSM, categorization schemes, word games, language.

As for therapies, why talk to just any wise person, and gawdforbid, tip them, when you could talk with a licensed whatever. So the boards are invented for the purpose of exalting the field and then they layer on rules, etc. Like a club.

So... I can say to folks, you want advice, come talk with me, I'm a "life management coach"... or well, actually, I don't have to. I can do the same thing as a "lawyer". But whatever. If you're an astrologer, or a palm reader, or a professional listener, or heck, just hold out as a spiritual reality guidance master, or a minister.

Anyway, the psychologists have to have something that differentiates them, and while it's been slow going on their lobbying for these non-medical people to have the right to be able to prescribe drugs goodgod (they actually have snowed a couple of state legislatures), ASSESSMENT TOOLS are the only thing they have a monopoly on for marketing purposes. That, and the pretext to being scientists and having to spend a longer time in school.

http://www.thelizlibrary.org