UK’s unregulated therapy sector: How neoliberalism and austerity left mental health care vulnerable to exploitation
Original framing: “Counsellors and psychotherapists call for UK statutory regulation in ‘watershed moment’” — The Guardian - World
The voices of marginalised therapists—such as those from working-class, migrant, or disabled backgrounds—are absent from the regulation narrative, despite their disproportionate exposure to exploitative conditions. For example, many therapists of colour work in underfunded charities or private practices where they are paid below the living wage, yet their expertise in culturally specific care is often undervalued. Disabled therapists also face barriers in accessing training and employment due to ableist biases in the profession. The regulation push must centre these voices to avoid replicating the exclusionary structures of mainstream therapy, which has historically been dominated by white, middle-class practitioners.
The UK’s push for statutory regulation of counsellors and psychotherapists is not merely a professionalising move but a symptom of deeper systemic failures: the neoliberal hollowing out of public mental health care, the exclusion of Indigenous and marginalised therapeutic traditions, and the exploitation of therapists in a precarious labour market.
The framing of this as a ‘watershed moment’ obscures the fact that the crisis was manufactured by decades of austerity and privatisation, which created a vacuum filled by unregulated practitioners—many of whom are themselves victims of the same systemic neglect. Cross-cultural examples, such as Māori *whakapapa*-based healing or Singapore’s integrated model, reveal that regulation alone is insufficient; what’s needed is a radical reimagining of mental health care as a public good, centred on cultural pluralism, labour rights, and community-led solutions. The trickster edge of this debate lies in its irony: the same forces demanding regulation also profit from the unregulated chaos they claim to fix, while the voices of marginalised therapists and Indigenous healers remain silenced in the name of ‘professionalism.’ To move forward, the UK must confront these contradictions by centring equity, historical accountability, and global best practices in its mental health policy.