ABSTRACT
Clinicians are used to formal ethics codes and standards. Each subspecialty within psychology has a written code, and members of professional organizations are generally well aware of them. Therapists take required ethics courses in graduate school, and clinicians take mandatory continuing education in various ethical and legal topics as they evolve. Psychotherapists of various types are members of long-standing, established professions and these professions have rules, traditions, organizations, mores, and a culture. The American Psychological Association has been publishing ethical codes and standards since 1953. In psychotherapy, there is even a complex “standard of care,” the unwritten normative behaviors expected of members of the professional community. Practitioners are held to those standards.
