McFall, 2006). More emphasis will be placed on
coursework involving empirically supported brief
psychological interventions and focal assessment.
Training programs that do not employ faculty
with expertise in these areas may produce gradu-
ates without the requisite skills to compete in the
marketplace.
Finally, there may be an undersupply of
academic and research-oriented clinical psycholo-
gists. If true, scientist-practitioner and clinical
scientist programs may be in a better position to
meet this need. Research-oriented clinical psy-
chologists will be better able to develop and eval-
uate effective treatments for psychological
problems, evaluate programs in health care set-
tings, and provide supervision for both research
and for administering empirically supported treat-
ments. As we discuss later in this chapter, all of
these roles are highly valued in the current behav-
ioral health care market in which effectiveness,
accountability, and cost-efficiency are emphasized
(Baker et al., 2009).
Professional Regulation
As clinical psychology grew and the number of its
practitioners multiplied, issues of professional
competence began to arise. How is the public to
know who is well trained and who is not? Many
people have neither the time, inclination, nor
sophistication to distinguish the well-trained pro-
fessional from the charlatan. Professional regula-
tion, therefore, has attempted to protect the
public interest by developing explicit standards of
competence for clinical psychologists. Professional
regulation is complicated by the fact that no
national standard exists; the requirements for
both certification and for licensure can vary
markedly from state to state.
Certification. Certification is a relatively weak
form of regulation in most cases. Originally de-
veloped by state psychological associations, it
guarantees that people cannot call themselves“psy-
chologists”while offering services to the public for
a fee unless they have been certified by a state board
of examiners. Such certification often involves an
examination, but sometimes it consists only of a
review of the applicant’s training and professional
experience. Certification is an attempt to protect
the public by restricting the use of the title
“psychologist.”Its weakness is that it does not pre-
vent anyone (from the poorly trained to outright
quacks) from offering psychological services to the
public so long as the noncertified persons who offer
such services do not use the title“psychologist”or
the wordpsychologicalto describe themselves or their
services. Some cynics have alleged that certification
does more to protect psychologists than it does to
protect the public.
Certification laws were often the result of
effective psychiatric lobbying of state legislatures.
Because many psychiatrists wanted to reserve psy-
chotherapy as the special province of medicine,
they resisted any law that would recognize the
practice of psychotherapy by any non-medical spe-
cialty. As a result, certification laws were the best
regulation that psychologists could obtain.Licensing. Licensingis a stronger form of legisla-
tion than certification. It not only specifies the
nature of the title (“psychologist”) and training
required for licensure but it also usually defines
what specific professional activities may be offered
to the public for a fee. With certification, for exam-
ple, individuals might call themselves“therapists”
and then proceed to provide“psychotherapeutic”
services with impunity. Many state licensing laws
are designed to prevent such evasions by defining
psychotherapy and specifically making it the prov-
ince of psychiatry, clinical psychology, or other
designated professions. However, determined char-
latans are difficult to contain, and such persons may
be very clever in disguising the true nature of their
activities.
To help strengthen this system of oversight and
consumer protection, the American Psychological
Association developed a model act for the licensureCURRENT ISSUES IN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY 67