Australian Society of Traditional Medicine (ATMS) Registers Hypnotherapists

HypnosisAustralia, May 2005

By Dr Tracie O'Keefe DCH, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Psychotherapist & Counsellor
Editorial Director of HypnosisAustralia Online.

There is no doubt that registration for practitioners and training establishments is the doyenne of good practice. Varying professional hypnosis associations are getting their acts together in registering and monitoring their members. Schools teaching hypnosis and hypnotherapy are now also lining themselves up to try to get whatever recognition they can by governments and anyone else who will give them a seal of approval.

Could the ATMS getting in on the hypnosis market be important or just another form of division in the hypnosis community? Certainly having all the hypnotherapists under one organisation would be the ideal but for the moment that does not seem to be feasible. While the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA) has a couple of hypnosis member organisations under its umbrella, there are still many which are not.

Certainly the ATMS is a large and well-run not-for-profit organisation with 10,000 members covering 34 disciplines. It sits on government committees and knows how to manage the political agendas through years of experience in the market place.

Since the ATMS has been around a lot longer than PACFA, looking after a large catalogue of natural practitioners, it may have a far better understanding of the paramedical and complementary medicine market place than PACFA. This is none so clear than when looking at how ATMS has gained insurance rebates from private health funds across the board for its practitioners.

One of the major problems with ATMS, however, is that it recognises practitioners only to graduate status and should a practitioner have a doctorate in clinical psychology, clinical hypnotherapy, or any adjunct clinical disciplines, it refuses to recognise those. What the ATMS says is that those persons may not address themselves using the title Dr, which is acceptable in the US, Europe and in large parts of Australia for a wide variety of disciplines, both within academia and within clinical practice. This seems a very unwise move for the ATMS to make, since it downgrades practitioners, and is probably rooted in its paranoia about its naturopathic practitioners being confused with allopathic MDs.

As well as having the ATMS practitioners' register of hypnotherapists, there are currently two hypnosis schools with provisional recognition which are the Australian Academy of Hypnotic Science and the Academy of Applied Hypnosis. In the long run however the true test of the ATMS within the hypnosis market place will be its ability for inclusion. Far too many organisations are tied to the business ventures of a few individuals to the inexplicable exclusion of ordinary practitioners. Perhaps the competition between ATMS and PACFA could even be good thing.

©HypnosisAustralia, May 2005