AHA
Celebrates 60 Years
HypnosisAustralia,
May 2009
By
Dr Tracie O'Keefe DCH, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Psychotherapist &
Counsellor
Editorial Director of HypnosisAustralia Online.
The Australian
Hypnotherapists Association (AHA), as a professional body, will be 60
years old this year. The organisation celebrates its birthday with a big
bash around the AHA Sydney conference in September when it has guest speakers
from the UK and from America. Since hypnotherapy has been outlawed in
Australia in different states over the years and has often been dominated
by medicine and psychology, the AHA has to be congratulated on its survival
in what were often very difficult times for those practising as hypnotherapists.
As a professional group hypnotherapists are often cited by the government-registered
healthcare professions as alternative and complementary when, in fact,
records go back to Egyptian times when hypnosis was practised as a healing
modality.
The AHA is one of the biggest hypnotherapy associations in Australian
with an active body that runs open workshops for both members and non-members.
As an association it has been a campaigner for client health fund rebates
and representation to government for its members' interests. It has also
been an association member of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation
of Australia (PACFA) and over the past two years a contributing member
to setting up the Australian Hypnotherapists Council (AHC), which is proposed
to be an industry body for talking to government.
|
In a letter to the Council for Clinical Hypnotherapists (CCH), member
associations and training organisations in May this year, the AHA President
Bruni Brewin talked about the association's decision not to join the CCH
national register of hypnotherapists (The Australian National Hypnotherapy
Register - ANHR). She talked about how she believed that in order for
the AHA to comply with the New Private Health Insurance (PHI) guidelines,
the AHA cannot consort with an association that does not comply to those
rules. While it is true that some member organisations of CCH may have
to upgrade their standards to reach the PHI standards, the same criteria
may be true for some organisational members of PACFA.
The AHA claims
it already complies with the PHI regulations even before they come into
practice and that the work the association has done over the years has
enabled it to conform to changes in advance. This places members of AHA
in a privileged position within the profession of hypnotherapy and the
association purports to want to consort with the profession only through
the AHC. Some may see this as the AHA wanting to maintain its advantages
over other members of the profession, particularly as their members have
just been awarded a Medibank Private provider number, and as anyone in
healthcare knows, that is the golden seal of approval within the PHI market.
The AHA's stance could also be perceived as protecting their members'
interests.
One must
also consider that the AHA has been somewhat sidelined by PACFA in that
PACFA refuses, as this journal predicted, to acknowledge the professional
title of hypnotherapist and insists that if hypnotherapists are on the
joint PACFA & Australian Counselling Association (ACA) Australian
Register of Counsellors And Psychotherapists (ARCAP) then they are counsellors
or psychotherapists, not hypnotherapists. If the ARCAP register eventually
manages to get Medicare rebates for its registrant's clients it will need
to be for counselling or psychotherapy and will not be for hypnotherapy.
On its website
the AHA invites other hypnotherapy organisations to come under their umbrella
as member organisations. This could be seen as the AHA being in contradiction
of its involvement in the AHC. Undoubtedly the AHA may have preferred
that the whole profession join the AHA, but many interstate hypnotherapists
felt that may have meant being dominated from a mainly NSW organisation.
Old rivalries
have meant that starting again for much of the profession. The CCH national
register of hypnotherapists has tried to clean the slate and create something
of an even playing field for all. But the AHA's refusal to join the CCH
has left most of the profession divided, with the majority of the profession
on one side of the fence and the AHA on the other. The profession can
indeed exist as such and may still be able to talk with government through
the AHC, but it is far from ideal as two halves never make a whole, only
a hole in this case. Do Australian hypnotherapists really want to repeat
history like Charcot vs Janet, Freud vs Jung, Bandler vs Grinder or is
the profession old enough after thousands of years to find a way forward
for unity in Australian hypnotherapy? How will the various associations'
presidents put the two halves together in the future?
Hypnosis
Australia Online Journal wishes the AHA and its members a very happy birthday
and a wonderful conference.
For more
details on the AHA conference, visit http://www.ahahypnotherapy.org.au/world-conference-1.htm
©HypnosisAustralia,
May 2009
|