At present in the UK, anyone at all, qualified or not, can call themselves a counsellor, a psychotherapist or some sort of a psychological therapist. This means that a lot of very inadequately qualified, and all too often actually unqualified, people advertise themselves as therapists. It is therefore very important that prospective clients ensure that any practitioner that they consult is a member of a Qualifying Professional Body such as the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy or the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. This is because such professional associations can discipline bad practitioners. They also publish easily checkable standards for the levels of professional practice and ethical behaviour that clients should be able to expect.
