On July 2, 2024, the BC Ministry of Health designated Psychotherapy as a health profession under the Health Professions Act. Follow our four-part series to learn more about the history and work of the psychotherapy profession.
Psychotherapy is grounded in personal interaction between therapists and clients, with a goal of improving wellness or mental health for individuals, relationships, families, or groups through inviting change in behaviour, beliefs, emotions and thoughts
History
Psychotherapy is a profession with roots in both medical traditions (briefly described in part 1) and in more humanistic and spiritual traditions. Beginning early in the 19th century, the provision of compassionate care for the mentally ill, rather than mere institutionalization, led to the development of many different approaches to providing a caring and protected environment in which psychological difficulties could be resolved. This movement away from asylums into community treatment reflected changing ideas about mental illness with more focus on social, emotional and environmental factors.
Causal explanations for symptomatic behaviour were less focused on the body and more on the mind. For example, the phenomenon of “hysteria” was instructive in that the effects of psychological events (such as trauma) were known to have physical effects which could be cured via hypnosis. This observation demonstrated that cognitive and emotional events could both cause and cure troubling symptomatic behaviour without reference to biology or chemistry.
This psychogenic (having a psychological origin) trend is now very broadly applied in the profession and works from the idea that ways of coping with life’s challenges are shaped by cultural pressures and societal expectations as well as by individual experiences. Treatment approaches grounded in this tradition rely upon the provision of a safe and caring setting in which the client can undertake the work to deal with the problem(s) which brought them to therapy. These problems range from dealing with the symptoms of diagnosed mental illness, to issues more associated with wellness such as coping with loss of a loved one, finding safety and security in an intimate relationship, or questioning the meaning of life.