RTÉ Investigates: Ireland’s Unregulated Psychologists – Devastating public service broadcasting

It’s frightening what you can get away with in Ireland if you have enough of a brass neck. That’s the takeaway from RTÉ Investigates: Ireland’s Unregulated Psychologists (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm), a damning if unconventionally structured report on the appalling lack of regulation of private psychologists.

The focus of the film is a psychologist whose qualifications are revealed to be bogus. Two of the universities to which the individual’s degrees were attributed said the documentation did not match their records. Another stated they were fake. Yet families engaged this person to provide private autism assessments. The person also gave expert evidence to the High Court.

“It’s really shocking, the vulnerability families are experiencing, the pressure families are under,” says Adam Harris, chief executive of the autism charity As I Am. “And then to think that there’d be somebody who would take advantage of that, who would present themselves in a way that is not correct.”

This is solid reporting. Still, there is a sense through the short film that RTÉ has, as American journalists might say, “buried the lede”. The report starts as one thing and then pivots to another: the initial focus is on the plight of parents whose children are indicating signs of autism or ADHD but whose need for professional assessment is put on the long finger by the HSE. “I’m meeting closed doors left, right and centre,” says one mother.

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The testimony is shocking – though, alas, not surprising. However, it’s only later that the documentary pivots to its real bombshell, which is that, though psychologists in the public sector must be professionally qualified, no such stipulation exists in the private equivalent. And when there is a void – especially in Ireland – charlatans will rush to fill it.

The point is demonstrated by the RTÉ reporter Barry O’Kelly, who downloads from the internet professional-looking degrees in just a few hours. “It couldn’t be any simpler because there’s nobody to stop it,” says Harris. He continues: “Buy a brass plate, put it up, say you’re a psychologist, set yourself up a website, maybe find some interest groups that are related to psychology that sound impressive but are probably open to anybody, sign up to those, put their logos on your website, perhaps offer a slightly cheaper rate for assessment than others do, perhaps target a community of people where there’s a shortage of professionals working in the space...”

The ones paying the price for this regulatory shambles are, as ever, members of the public – specifically parents desperate to have their children assessed for autism or other conditions. “I had put my faith in something that no longer meant anything,” says one woman who had gone to the psychologist for an assessment. “I struggled with that.”

“I poured my heart out to this person,” says another, who sought an autism assessment as an adult. “Secondary school, college life, dating…”

The latest episode of RTÉ Investigates is important public-service broadcasting. The only quibble is that slight misstep of setting itself up as a report on HSE dysfunction when it is really about people pretending to be something they are not. When it finally gets down to business, it is devastating.

[ 15-minute city? For many Irish people, that’s the time by which the bus or train is late ]