Grifters are exploiting overdose crisis
Lack of accreditation for mental health professionals dangerous during drug crisis
Anyone in British Columbia can build a website and sell their services as an “interventionist” promising to rescue people from the throes of addiction and get them into care.
In fact, without government regulation, anyone can claim to be a mental health professional, use the name “counsellor” or “therapist,” set up a private practice and charge whatever they want.
The problem has festered for at least two decades. But now it has taken on more urgency as the province enters the third year of a public health emergency due to the illicit-drug overdose crisis, and an increasing number of grifters are taking financial advantage of desperate families willing to pay anything if it helps their loved ones.
There are legitimate addiction counsellors and therapists who do interventions. But with no provincial registry, no standards, no enforcement of standards or codes of conduct, it’s impossible to know who they are and whether their claimed experience or the alphabet soup of real or imagined qualifications tacked on after their name is legitimate.
The country’s only accreditation body, the Canadian Addiction Counsellors Certification Federation, estimates there are 3,000 addiction therapists, counsellors and interventionists in British Columbia.
Only 225 British Columbians are certified by the federation, leaving 2,775 or more who work without any kind of oversight, and leaving patients and their families with no recourse to file a complaint.
CACCF members must have two years of full-time experience within a five-year period providing direct, supervised counselling services to persons with the primary diagnosis of alcoholism and/or drug addiction; 270 documented hours of formal education; and 300 hours of documented, supervised clinical training in 12 different core function areas, including crisis intervention, treatment planning, assessment, counselling and record keeping.
Over the past two years, the CACCF has received 11 complaints from British Columbia. Nine were about uncertified practitioners. The other two were against the same CACCF member, who is still under investigation.
Yet even if members have breached the standards and/or code of ethics, the CACCF has no power to stop them from carrying on doing what they’re doing.
“The very serious allegations (that are investigated) have zero repercussions,” executive director Crystal Smalldon said in an email.
“There is absolutely nothing we can do except continuously speak to the government about regulating the industry.”
For the past 20 years, Glen Grigg has also been urging British Columbia to regulate his profession.
“As therapists, we have heard stories of multiple deaths because of incompetent therapists, suicides, eating disorders treated improperly that resulted in deaths, substance disorders where people who didn’t get the right treatment overdosed,” says Grigg, who has a doctorate in clinical and counselling psychology.
He was part of the Task Group for Counsellor Regulation when it was formed in 1997, which became the Federation of Associations for Counselling Therapists in B.C. (FACT B.C.) in 2014. It represents 13 professional associations and more than 5,000 members.
“We have constantly asked the Ministry of Health to regulate the profession,” he said in an interview. “Up until the opioid crisis, this was not front-page news. There was a lot of quiet suffering, but it wasn’t something that people would call up a reporter and talk about.”
The overdose deaths laserfocused attention on addiction’s extreme risks and the harms that can be inflicted by bad treatment or no treatment at all. But Grigg said policy-makers seem loath to acknowledge that bad mental health professionals can do as much harm as bad surgeons.
“To a lot of them, (therapy) looks like advice giving,” Grigg said.
But there is a high risk of harm, especially since 70 per cent of counselling therapists are in private practice with no supervisor, no contact with others, and no independent oversight. Because confidentiality is key to therapy’s success, Grigg noted that surveillance cameras or anything similar aren’t possible.
Ensuring the quality of work and protecting against harm is precisely why there are professional colleges for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, engineers and others.
Alberta introduced legislation last week establishing a College of Counselling Therapy to regulate and ensure that only qualified professionals use the titles of counselling therapist, addiction counsellor, drug and alcohol counsellor, and child and youth care counsellor. That puts it in line with Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which already have similar legislation. Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, as well as Newfoundland and Labrador have legislation pending.
British Columbia, which provides more protection for car buyers from scammers than for those seeking help to deal with addictions or other mental health issues, remains an outlier.
But Grigg may be justified in his optimism that change may finally be coming.
Despite its insistence only last week that there is no need to regulate interventionists, the mental health and addictions ministry said Tuesday in an emailed statement that it is working with FACT B.C. and the health ministry to “determine the best path forward to ensure that British Columbians receive appropriate care when they see a counsellor in the province.”