An open letter to the helping industry

Attention: Australian Counselling Association, Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia, Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, Australian Psychological Society, The Honourable Jennifer McAllister (Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme), National Disability Insurance Scheme, Australian Association of Social Workers, Australian Association of Psychologists, Services Australia, Department of Education, Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, Australian Tertiary Education Commission, Office For Youth, Australian Skills Quality Authority, National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare, Australian Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Australian Institute of Family Studies, Department of Social Services, The Honourable Mark Butler (Minister for Health and Ageing), The Honourable Emma McBride (Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention), The Honourable Rebecca White (Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care), The Honourable Amanda Rishworth (Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations), The Honourable Andrew Giles (Minister for Skills and Training), The Honourable Patrick Gorman (Assistant Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations), The Honourable Jason Clare (Minister for Education), The Honourable Tanya Plibersek (Minister for Social Services), The Honourable Ged Kearney (Assistant Minister for Social Services)

To all parties concerned,

Re.: An open letter to the helping industry

I am writing this open letter to you to share important concerns about the state of Australia's mental health and helping industry. I address all of you as each of your respective bodies is in some way associated with the role of helping people to live optimal lives, be this via overseeing the work of helping professionals, administering the laws and government schemes that provide for helping, training such professionals, or regulating said training. I am hoping that you will take the time to consider my reflections. I would like to introduce myself; I am a counsellor and citizen journalist, with a diverse history of both my own struggles and helping other people to overcome theirs. The people we help are in dire need, and we can all be responsible for helping to create the change necessary.

Although I have observed the concerns I am to describe for years now, a number of recent events have acted as further prompts. The Australian Psychological Society (A.P.S.; 2026b) has warned that access to psychology services (different from counselling supposedly, although largely serving similar purposes) may have been falling short by 57.3 per cent in 2025; that figure is projected to reach 96.6 per cent by 2038. Some time before this, the National Standards for Counselling and Psychotherapy were endorsed (Australian Counselling Association [A.C.A.], 2026b). For those unfamiliar, the titles of "counsellor" and "psychotherapist" are not protected in the same way that "psychologist" and "psychiatrist" and their corresponding professions are. This means that there are fewer legal requirements that people must meet to practice as counsellors or psychotherapists, supposedly causing inconsistency in the quality of services delivered, as well as confusion among the public about where they should seek particular types of assistance for particular types of problems. These National Standards are reportedly intended to create greater uniformity in the regulation of the counselling industry to address this problem. Evidently, services are in shortage and attempts are being made to address this.

What is not being addressed, however, is another problem greatly impacting the entry of new practitioners in to the industry, the demarcation of different service provisions, and through these factors, the availability of services about which we are supposedly so concerned: that our systems are overly complicated and conceptualise that the different helping professions are separate rather than components of a larger scheme, along with the similar nature of education and professional membership. We should be recognising the similarity of the skills of all helping professionals and their contributions to our mental health needs, unifying our understanding of mental health so that we can all contribute, and sharing resources so that more people in need are aware of them. Instead, our industries are not nearly familiar enough with each other, and within our cohorts we turn credentials in to games. We suppose that psychologists are "real" therapists that help with "real" problems, counsellors only help with "minor" problems, only therapists accredited with "this" body should work "here", only therapists trained in "that" obscure modality should work with "those" people, and only "these" qualifications are considered sufficient for someone to be able to work with "complex" cases. Much of our industry is so busy playing these games, keeping people perpetually studying for new qualifications, and using said qualifications as some source of truth that ignores real skills and the reality of living, that we have forgotten the reason that our roles exist: to provide accessible and effective help to people.

In the ensuing letter, I will provide my perspectives (for the benefit of both yourselves and other readers) on how these problems manifest. I will also provide an example of the rationale which I would use to address some of these problems, although I acknowledge that these issues are complex and that this type of reasoning would need refining. I will also be critiquing popular thought relevant to academia and our job titles, but must emphasise that I am in no way deriding any person's contributions to society. That a framework is irrational or that an industry is politicised does not mean that most of its constituents are at fault or that they are not virtuous. I firmly maintain that a competent professional becomes competent via their own efforts, intentions, and seeking of knowledge, and that their qualifications help but are not sufficient in themselves to provide them competence and a sound ethos. This is evident in the fact that there are qualified but incompetent practitioners of a range of fields. So rather than feel defensive, consider that I am criticising ideas rather than the good work of people. These are my own evaluations only; I do not communicate on behalf of other parties and am not implying endorsement of or by them, nor should any of this content be taken as advice. Let us commence by explaining the major psychological mechanism that underlies the problem: reification.

The reification problem

Our first problem is that there are numerous types of helping professionals working across different contexts that should actually be considered to be working toward the same goal, but which are instead treated as completely separate. Think of counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, psychosocial recovery coaches and positive behaviour support practitioners (P.R.C. and P.B.S. respectively, under the National Disability Insurance Scheme or N.D.I.S.), family preservation and reunification practitioners (F.P.R.P.), peer workers, mental health and wellbeing practitioners or clinicians, and mental health coaches. Some of you may not be familiar with all of these as they are titles referring to specific roles within specific parts of our industry, sometimes within a government-funded program. This abundance of roles creates multiple problems. First, it creates confusion among members of the public, for whom there is no consistent, centralised source of what each of these professionals actually do and why they may seek help from one as opposed to another. Relatedly, it sometimes creates discontinuity in care in which it is difficult for a single client to have their needs met by a single provider because each has rigid role specifications. Second, it creates inflexibility in the workforce, keeping people from transitioning from one role to another because institutions assume that the necessary sets of skills are different. This theoretically contributes to limitations in hiring as employers seek to only hire those with specific qualifications rather than understanding individual skills themselves and candidates' experience. Third, it theoretically leads to under-utilisation of resources as referrers may assume that their clients can only be helped by a particular type of service which is already in short supply. These all result from a single psychological tendency that is simultaneously a part of our functioning and responsible for some of our greatest mistakes. It is called "reification".

Reification means treating something abstract or theoretical as if it has the qualities which we suppose it does objectively. When the subject in question is not a physical object but either a concept that exists entirely within our minds, or a phenomenon for which we have created such a concept, we face the risk of mistaking how we think about that subject for how it is objectively. Providing mental health support to people is a most relevant example. Regardless of our title and field, the psychological workings of that support are "reified"; what we are observing are not the change mechanics or the changes in thoughts and emotions themselves, but the outcomes of the changes and the client's reports of their experiences. We know that the process is real because our clients can demonstrate new insight and report change when they are conducted properly. Our entire understanding of the mind (as opposed to the brain) essentially works on this principle. We know that our minds' workings are real even though we can not technically observe them, but due to how the mind works, we could not understand them unless we assumed that they had certain qualities or features.

Reification is evident in how we treat our different professions. While we often do need to demarcate roles in any industry, we are effectively convinced that the objective realities of the roles are different because we refer to them using different concepts and language, as if nature invented the different roles and gave them scope that could not be changed. In fact, the differences are largely manufactured. Even though we do not necessarily invent the problems that we solve, we do invent the terminology and define the scope of our practices. Even though these roles can only function as we practice them because they are ideas rather than physical entities, we treat them as though they function from immutable natural laws. To demonstrate this, let us first consider some examples of how these various professions are defined.

"Counselling involves a safe and confidential collaboration between qualified practitioners and clients to promote mental health and wellbeing, enhance self-understanding, and resolve identified concerns." (A.C.A, 2026a)

"Psychotherapy focuses on the whole person, encompassing somatic, emotional, mental, cultural, relational, and spiritual aspects of health and well-being. It is a holistic and relational psychotherapeutic approach that addresses everyday concerns, mental health problems, and severe mental illness. In psychotherapy, mental illness and psychopathology are understood as disruptions to the developing self which have been caused by repetitive trauma of an interpersonal nature." (Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia [P.A.C.F.A.], n.d.).

"Psychologists study individuals and groups to better understand how people, communities and societies function, and devise ways to empower them and help them thrive. We do this through our understanding of mental and biological functions that drive behaviour." (A.P.S., 2026a)

"Social work is a university-qualified profession dedicated to assisting people to improve their lives, with a focus on their personal and social wellbeing. Social workers take the time needed to build relationships with people so that together they can consider all aspects of their situation, including their strengths and capacities, as well as the areas where they need help. They offer solutions, supports and pathways that make sense in the context of the person’s environment, preferences and abilities." (Australian Association of Social Workers, 2026)

"A [P.R.C.] supports you with your recovery. Recovery means being able to live a purposeful and meaningful life. Recovery coaches are a type of support available to participants with psychosocial disability. Their aim is to support participants with psychosocial disability in their recovery journey. Recovery coaches provide support to increase: independence...social participation...[and] economic participation. They support people with psychosocial disability to take more control of their lives and to better manage the complex challenges of daily living. A recovery coach does the following: Spends time with you and those important to you, to get to know you and understand your needs...Helps you learn about different services and supports, and how these can help you...Supports you to learn about the evidence-based supports which will be best for you in your recovery journey...Supports you to understand your rights and build your capacity to self-advocate...Helps you get support from mental health services and other health services...Supports you to better understand and use your NDIS plan...Supports you to live a full and meaningful life as chosen by you." (National Disability Insurance Agency, 2025)

"[P.B.S.] is an evidence, value and rights based approach. It focuses on improving a person’s quality of life and understanding the reasons behind behaviour and ways to meet a person’s needs. This includes strategies such as teaching a person new skills, making changes to their environment and providing guidance to their support team." (National Disability Insurance Scheme Quality and Safeguards Commission, 2026)

"Family Preservation and Reunification Response aims to support and build strong families with children who are safe, healthy, resilient and thriving, and to support parents and other care givers to create a safe and nurturing home environment...The response practitioner will work with families to seek to understand their unique experience and perspectives and will deliver support families through programs and strategies that have been proven to make a difference for children and families. The support a family may receive may include: Working with a family regularly at home or in place where they feel comfortable to provide them with support and strategies to build their parenting skills and confidence...Linking families to other services and community supports as needed." (Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, 2023)

"The mental health consumer and carer workforce includes consumer and carer workers whose position description specifies that they have a lived experience. In the public and private mental health and community sectors, consumers and carers are increasingly being employed specifically to provide expertise based on their lived experience and associated skills. They are employed in positions with titles such as consumer advocate or carer advocate, consumer consultant or carer consultant, peer support worker or mentor...Unlike clinical mental health services, which are usually based on the medical model, peer-run services are based on the principle that individuals who have shared similar experiences can help themselves and each other through self-help and mutual support." (Department of Health, 2019, on peer workers)

The A.C.A.'s definition of a counsellor is succinct and useful; in practice, it means that counselling someone means helping them to learn how to solve problems. The A.P.S.' definition of a psychologist is similarly effective in that psychology is in fact the study of how people function individually and collectively via thoughts, emotions, and actions. Notwithstanding the different qualifications and licensing requirements, some argue that counselling is not a subdomain of psychology, but its own discrete practice. What exactly is the difference? Some argue that psychology uses a diagnostic or medical model, while counselling uses a more fluid approach to incorporate a broader range of domains of a person's wellbeing. Others suggest that psychologists treat more severe concerns or mental illness, or that they can implement full structured interventions. Others still make the analogy that psychology is to engineering what counselling is to art.

A certain amount of this differentiation is necessary, as the training needed to diagnose mental illnesses is additional to that used to treat problems. But in order to "promote mental health and wellbeing, enhance self-understanding, and resolve identified concerns", one must actually have the fundamental "understand[ing of] how people, communities and societies function". And "devis[ing] ways to empower them and help them thrive" also must involve working to "promote mental health and wellbeing, enhance self-understanding, and resolve identified concerns". So although the educational and legal statuses, and defined scopes of practice, of these professions are separate, this separation is manufactured by our own social institutions (the law, universities, professional bodies, et cetera); the actual interventions likely to be effective do not change based on the professional, but on the person and their problems. If both types of professional generally can not approach a similar client and utilise similar understanding and approaches (assuming diagnosis is not necessary), it is not because nature created separate counsellors and psychologists and engineered their brains differently. It is because scientific and regulatory institutions have relied too greatly on our conceptualisations of the mind rather than striving to understand the objective reality. Most of the problems for which people seek therapy could be addressed equally well by a competent therapist of any type ― the key component is competence.

While P.A.C.F.A.'s definition of psychotherapy is equally useful, there is vast inconsistency between sources that profess for there to be a distinct difference between counselling and psychotherapy. Some suggest counselling is short-term, while psychotherapy is long-term. Others suggest that psychotherapy is focussed on deeper problems while counselling is focussed on present solutions. This kind of debate creates all kinds of philosophical binds that confuse what can be a much simpler matter. When a professional is helping someone, they must understand the bases on which problems develop and how to reveal these bases and help the individual change their functioning to solve them. Across the most common problems that people encounter, the skills needed to do this are remarkably similar. There is rarely if ever an instance in which a practitioner can conduct their role without introducing qualities associated with either definition. Consider a given type of exercise used in physical injury rehabilitation with which a range of practitioners may help. Regardless of whether a general practitioner, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, or osteopath prescribes it, the nature of the exercise and its workings remain the same, as does its name. What would be the problem with using "psychotherapy" to refer to the practice, and "counsellor", "psychologist", "psychotherapist", or "therapist" to refer to the person conducting it? We will address this more later.

In the definition of P.R.C., "liv[ing] a purposeful and meaningful life" is inextricably tied to "promot[ing] mental health and wellbeing" (counselling), and can in fact only be done by "resolv[ing] identified concerns" (also counselling). So what exactly is the difference? Is it that counselling is considered "clinical" while P.R.C. is not? This is something that has been implied. But the definition of "clinical" is: "relating to the examination and treatment of patients and their illnesses" (Oxford University Press, 2026). The privately-funded clients with whom I consult as a counsellor do not all have mental illness diagnoses, but to receive N.D.I.S. funding for psychological supports, one must have a diagnosis (at the time of writing). And counsellors are not even qualified to diagnose mental illnesses. Furthermore, although "clinical mental health services...are usually based on the medical model" (referring to the difference between them and peer work), there is no reason that a clinician can not make their practice more humanistic by using wisdom from lived experience (as peer workers do) ― and similarly, no reason that a person with lived experience can not use clinical knowledge to understand the person whom they are helping.

Now consider P.B.S. A bureaucrat will almost certainly tell you that it is not therapy. But where in contemporary standards is therapy not considerate of "evidence" and a client's "rights"? Does it not "improve a person’s quality of life [through] understanding the reasons behind behaviour and ways to meet [their] needs"? Does it not involve "teaching a person new skills"?

Now consider F.P.R.P. While helping families is often a more intense and complex process than helping an individual, family problems arise from the same psychological workings that underly the problems for which people seek counselling. While the goal may be "build[ing] strong families with children who are safe, healthy, resilient and thriving, and to support parents and other care givers to create a safe and nurturing home environment", doing this successfully by "understand[ing] their unique experience and perspectives" and "provid[ing] them with support and strategies to build their parenting skills and confidence" requires the same psychological understanding and skill that a competent family counsellor or psychologist has.

Do you understand the problem? The nature of a person's problems do not magically change when the consulting professional changes. A major problem in academic social science is that it proposes completely different explanations for different aspects of our functioning, rather than recognising that there are more universal core components of human functioning that can be both used to explain problems and addressed to solve them. I produced an episode of my podcast on this subject, which can be found here.

Although we are taught it in university, our systems implicitly forget that "models" are not nature's reality; they are human-constructed attempts to understand a reality which we did not create. Nature is so diverse that it is implausible that one model created by a human can adequately explain all of it. Practitioners usually need to refer to ideas that are associated with multiple models to understand a problem properly.

Apart from this inconsistency, within the professions themselves there has been what I consider to be unnecessary division of practitioners. I suspect that this leads to employers relying too greatly on these classifications, and on frameworks and certifications in deciding who to hire rather than on individual skill and potential. It also potentially creates confusion among prospective clients. To consider how this manifests, both the A.C.A. and the P.A.C.F.A. have different categories of membership to denote members with different qualifications and/or levels of experience. A fellow counsellor told me that they were approached by a prospective client who sought their services to be funded by a particular scheme. The former had to explain that they "did not have the right level" required to meet the scheme's minimum requirements. It was an awkward exchange: how does one explain to a prospective client that they are a legitimate counsellor, but one that is not considered sufficient to be funded by the government? Commentary also abounds on counselling graduates who struggle to find work, even though they are qualified and have undertaken requisite internships, because employers want professional credentials (such as being a level 3 member of the A.C.A.) that can only be obtained with significant experience. In the new National Standards (A.C.A., 2026b), practitioners are classified by "career stages" from one through to three, with descriptors of practice standards for each. While certain standards such as ethics remain constant for all stages, consider the descriptors in each of these domains for the given stages:

Focus area 4.1.1, personal competence, stage 1:

"Has a broad theoretical and technical knowledge of counselling and/or psychotherapy.

Is able to use cognitive, technical and communication skills to analyse relevant counselling and/or psychology information, including theories and risks, to develop therapeutic responses and interventions collaboratively with clients.

Actively monitors their competence through supervision and is willing to consider any views expressed by their clients and their colleagues.

Is able to deliver the services being offered under supervision and carries out only those professional activities for which they have established their competence to practice.

Practices in areas new to them only after appropriate education, training, and supervision."

Now consider that same standard for stage 3:

"Has advanced and integrated understanding of a complex body of knowledge in counselling and/or psychotherapy.

Has expert, specialised cognitive and technical skills in counselling and/or psychotherapy to independently analyse critically, reflect on, and synthesise complex relevant counselling and/or psychology information, problems, concepts and theories to develop therapeutic responses and interventions collaboratively with clients.

Actively monitors their competence through supervision and is willing to consider any views expressed by their clients and their colleagues.

Is competent to deliver the services being offered and carries out only those professional activities for which they have established their competence to practice.

Practices in areas new to them only after appropriate education, training, and supervision and, when developing skills in the new specialty areas, takes steps to ensure the competence of their work and protect others from possible harm."

Notice that in stage three, words such as "complex" and "synthesise" differentiate the descriptors and imply greater expertise and suitability for clients with more severe problems. But how does one discern what knowledge is "complex"? And how exactly are we measuring the outcomes of services delivered by differently qualified practitioners for our clients? We will return to this problem later, but before we do so, exploration of problems in education and the workforce is critical.

Education and the workforce

It is logical that if one wishes to be a plumber, electrician, gardener, accountant, lawyer, chef, engineer, designer, biologist, pharmacist, hairdresser, builder, or professional in any other of these well-established occupations, courses exist that are titled as such and specifically structured to allow students to graduate having met the legal and/or industry standards required to obtain employment in those occupations. I can not claim for other professions, but can state that our industry is unnecessarily disjointed in this regard.

The bodies that train, regulate, and hire counsellors (and possibly the other helping professions I listed) are all separate and evidently are not communicating with each other sufficiently, if at all. Counselling students are often tasked with finding their own internships to complete their courses and struggle to do so because many clinics can not host them. Some have to repeat their placement units not because they did not meet the competency requirements, but because the clinics at which they had their placements could not find enough clients for them to fulfil their quota of practicing hours. Newly graduated counsellors have trouble finding work because different roles have different requirements that their university courses never met. Most positions require experience post-qualification, which people can not obtain for that very reason. Universities advertise graduate certificates and diplomas titled "counselling", only for graduates to find that employers want bachelor and masters degrees. Some of these qualifications are not even recognised by our major counselling bodies, drawing attention to a blatant ethical concern of educational institutions allowing students to accumulate debt for courses that do not meet the requirements generally considered necessary for the relevant field (some refer to "transferable skills" as justification, however this is a matter for another discussion). Jobs titled "counsellor" will sometimes require candidates to be licensed psychologists or accredited social workers. Jobs titled "mental health clinician", even ones that are purely for "intake", may accept candidates who are registered nurses or speech pathologists, but not counsellors. Even organisations that operate free telephone counselling services or are otherwise charities which do not pay particularly large remuneration (not that this should be the sole reason we enter the industry) often only hire counsellors with higher qualifications and significant experience ― candidates who would actually be competent to enter private practice, help with more complex cases, and get paid more. Is this not somewhat of an entitled ethos? Those new to private practice complain that finding clients is difficult, yet the popular narrative is that clients are struggling to find therapists ― so where are these clients? How many general practitioners might be telling their patients that it is difficult to find psychologists available to provide intervention to them, but refuse to refer to counsellors, of whom there are more with availability and competence?

Then there are all manner of qualifications and additional accreditations: peer support roles require peer support training, family violence roles require family violence training, certain clinics require additional accreditation in specific therapeutic modalities, et cetera. Few if any of these credentials are included in major counselling training ― and conveniently enough, many of them require certification processes (with costs to match) to obtain. Our two major industry bodies at the time of writing do not accept an undergraduate degree in psychology as acceptable for entrance, as it is not considered to be counselling-specific. A student who actually studied well in their psychology degree and had the capacity to be a counsellor would learn essential knowledge that informs quality therapy that they would not learn in a graduate diploma or diploma of counselling. Effective helping requires a basal knowledge of psychology. Our paradigm concludes that a person unfamiliar with key psychological concepts can obtain a postgraduate qualification and receive the title "counsellor", but a person who can effectively synthesise helping knowledge from basal psychology can not.

What is more, although the essential skills needed to be competent in the different helping professions are quite transferable, different bodies and institutions often do not recognise them. They all seem to require candidates to have specific experience and training in a narrow field of practice, but paradoxically, never provide opportunities for people to obtain work experience. This ethos may force students who wish to perform a specific role to study for qualifications that are not applicable to any other role, and then hope that they obtain it ― rather than collaborating with educational institutions to create qualifications that have broad applicability. And even after these efforts to hire candidates with all the desired qualifications, how often do we encounter people who are still incompetent, or are trapped in a system that forces them to work as if they were incompetent?

On that note, I will draw attention back to the definition of a social worker: "assisting people to improve their lives, with a focus on their personal and social wellbeing...build[ing] relationships with people so that together they can consider all aspects of their situation, including their strengths and capacities, as well as the areas where they need help...offer[ing] solutions, supports and pathways that make sense in the context of the person’s environment, preferences and abilities". This is also part of the description of what psychologists and counsellors do. In practice, the difference is that a social worker helps people during times of struggle and vulnerability to overcome the challenges via both individual and systemic assistance, facilitating the involvement of other parties and advocating to a greater extent than the other helping professionals. However, there are other professions which do this but are not inevitably considered to be social work and do not require social work qualifications ― most notably case management. I will draw attention to the resentment by some, for example, of case managers who do not have social work qualifications or registration but call themselves social workers. They argue that social work is its own field, incorporating psychology, sociology, political science, and similar in order to understand systemic issues affecting their clients. What we neglect is that fields such as these are not completely distinct practices; they draw greatly from psychology, which itself draws on other sciences. Psychology's endeavour is to explain the metaphysical functioning of humans. When we refer to any phenomenon involving humanity, explaining its root cause requires psychology immutably. A person well-versed in psychology (which undoubtedly many social workers and similar are) can take a person's situation, synthesise understanding, and work with them to find solutions, because they are utilising basal knowledge ― and with some extra learning, know what other services and systems could be utilised.

Academia and bureaucracy seem intent on over-complicating reality with theories, assumptions, and frameworks, because we have become so accustomed over centuries of human evolution to associating "thinking deeply" with intelligence and the status associated with it. Simultaneously, our industry essentially treats its practitioners as if they should be paying for the privilege of helping others. It is indeed a great privilege to be able to help people. But if people are greatly in need and there is supposedly a shortage, why is the industry not intent on making it easier for competent practitioners to enter? New industry entrants have trouble affording fees for professional development and supervision. Some new counsellors are wondering how they will be able to maintain the accreditation to be employable when the new national standards are implemented, according to which they have to maintain at least 150 practicing hours per year (or 75 client contact hours) at the time of writing; how can one even achieve this if they have trouble finding employment, and how might they find employment if the accreditation that is meant to make them employable is so difficult to maintain? How can anyone help others when they themselves risk falling subject to this type of burden?

What we are witnessing resembles preoccupation with unnecessary complex labels, structures, systems, trademarked methods, certifications, and aspiring to industry trends. We forget the core psychological essence that makes our professions possible, and most importantly, integrating in to a working system that our clients can actually access. What we need is to think with clarity, being truthful, realistic, and practical. If we were to synchronise a more robust and objective understanding of how our world works, we would realise that there is far more applicability in our skills than what we have assumed.

How might a logical system look?

With that sentiment, I am not suggesting that we should indiscriminately destroy our frameworks, as the unrest would be untenable. But let us consider a hypothetical situation. Given the resources and scope to do so, we could design a helping industry which was both simpler and made more use of people's skills. Most professionals providing psychotherapy could be amalgamated. There could be one recognised mental health profession outside of psychiatry (which would be reserved for complex cases requiring medical intervention) ― the title of either "psychologist" or "psychotherapist" would be most appropriate. There could be one set of government standards specifying the qualification and licensing requirements, and one five-year university degree to qualify. The first two years would be foundational psychology, and the next three would be training in the diagnosis and treatment of the vast majority of personal problems and mental illnesses, with both theoretical learning and internships. Every other helping profession outside of this and psychiatry could self-regulate. Social workers could be from a variety of backgrounds: people with qualifications in psychology as well as community services workers could be hired in to roles and trained on the job. It would be intense. It would be effortful. But it would be possible. And when a system is executed with that type of clear, logical thinking, we spend less time on superfluous mental effort and more time actually developing practical skills and solving problems.

We do not need cumbersome lists of different therapeutic methods and certifications, and academia need not be anywhere near as cumbersome as it is. Yes, psychology is abstract and can be complex, and a large component of what makes therapy successful is having the right "chemistry" with the therapist and their method ― which requires diversity in our approaches. But I willingly predict that in few other professions is there such demarcation between roles with a common goal as to necessitate asking what "level" someone is within which accreditation body. We could allow individuals the freedom to choose a range of different therapeutic modalities, as well as combining these with their own personalities, but if we properly established the basal knowledge of human functioning that facilitates helping, the only variables to address would be whether the client and therapist both felt comfortable with each other individually ― not if the therapist had by chance undertaken the training considered "correct" for that specific situation, because such training would be standard. And the argument that all of this complexity in our field is necessary for the purpose of "quality control" is nullified when we consider, as I have noted before in my work, the people who have experienced alarming treatment by different therapists who were apparently "well-regulated", because our paradigms did not consider what they did to be wrong or because it is difficult, if not impossible, to police the nuanced qualities of a therapist's practice that may well be the difference between whether therapy is safe and successful or not.

This is not the time to toss our hands in exasperation in a gesture of "it's not my problem". It is also not the time to deride each other, or become defensive of our titles and compare ourselves to other professionals. We have clients who need our care. It is alarming that in the midst of a supposed mental health crisis, the very people who could help are struggling to find work and are basically being made to pay in to what resembles an economic scheme of continuous education and professional accreditation requirements in the vague hope that they get to perform a role which they wish to perform. There should be synchrony between educators and the industry. A competent person should not be struggling to find work in an essential industry. One of the greatest excuses people have made throughout history is "it's not that simple!" In a society that values instant comfort over long-term virtue, we have to learn that we are capable of making life simpler if we are willing to not avoid the mental effort. I am calling upon everyone in the industry, from the government and regulating bodies to the individual practitioners, to communicate with each other, unite on a common goal, and share their own experiences. If we fail to act, then our esteemed industry will continue to degenerate in to one in which it will not be the most compassionate and skilled who are connected with the clients who can genuinely benefit from their help; it will be the ones with the most money and time to train, lexicon of trendy words, and social media skills who will be in the business to fuel their own cognitively dissonant egos with the moral licence that they must be a "good person who likes to help others". And to all those helpers who practice their professions for the right reasons and have the right values: I see you. I thank you. And it is your own hard work and ethos alone, not your status, that make you excellent.

References

Australian Association of Social Workers (2026). "About Social Work". https://www.aasw.asn.au/social-work/about-social-work/

Australian Counselling Association (2026a). "What is Counselling?" https://theaca.net.au/about-us/what-is-counselling

Australian Counselling Association (2026b). "Your Guide to National Standards for Counsellors & Psychotherapists". https://theaca.net.au/national-standards

Australian Psychological Society (2026a). "How can psychology help me?" https://psychology.org.au/psychology/about-psychology/what-is-psychology

Australian Psychological Society (2026b). "Urgent action required following release of Psychology Supply and Demand Study report". https://psychology.org.au/about-us/news-and-media/media-releases/2026/urgent-action-required-following-release-of-psycho?utm_source=miragenews&utm_medium=miragenews&utm_campaign=news

Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (2023). "Family Preservation and Reunification response". https://services.dffh.vic.gov.au/family-preservation-and-reunification-response

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