Via Chris, its come to my attention that the BBC’s Daily Politics show ran an interview with someone called Lucy Beresford, who describes herself on her own website as a ‘writer, psychodynamic psychotherapist, and media commentator’ in which she purports to psychoanalyse Gordon Brown.

Unfortunately, the BBC have billed her on their website as a ‘psychologist’…

..which she isn’t!

There is no Lucy Beresford on the British Psychological Society’s Register of Chartered Psychologists and, as such, she is not entitled to the regulated professional title ‘psychologist’.

She’s also not a psychiatrist – if she were she’d be a doctor – what she is, is a psychotherapist and a member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy, which is a registered charity which exist to:

promote the art and science of psychotherapy for the public benefit; to promote research and education in psychotherapy and disseminate the results of any such research; and to promote (or assist in the promotion, preservation and protection of public health by encouraging) high standards of training and practice in psychotherapy and the wider provision of psychotherapy for the public.

…and which maintains a voluntary register of psychotherapists.

And that, as regular readers will quickly realise, puts her professional standing somewhere on a par with holistic therapists, naturopaths, homoeopaths and other assorted purveyors of quasi-regulated woo – FFS, her website states that she works, at least some of the time at the private Priory Hospital in Roehampton, which still operates a fucking ECT facility, a practice that most psychologists wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

A good rule of thumb when looking at these kinds of umbrella organisations is to hunt around for their code of ethics – the British Psychological Society’s code weigh in at 26 A5 pages, 13 of which deal solely with ethical matters while the UK Council of Physiotherapists’ code fits on two pages of an A5 leaflet, including their complaints procedure.

So whio is Lucy Beresford?

Well it turns out she’s an ex-city trader who also presents the ‘Bad Sex Awards’ for the Literary Review…

Lucy Beresford is the latest City type to seek an alternative career in fiction. After ten years at Shearson Lehman and Barclays de Zoete Wedd, she qualified as a psychotherapist. “Working in the City enabled me to observe psychotic behaviour at first hand,” she says, I assume in jest. Former colleagues would know. Her Something I’m Not is published next month, a look at mothering and whether mothers all really love their children. Beresford has yet another career as the presenter of the Bad Sex Awards for the Literary Review. How on earth did you land that job? “Practise, Martin, practise.”

…and writes pop-psychology crap like ‘Facebook: the crack cocaine of networking‘ for the distinctly right-wing ‘The First Post’ and Self-flagellation and the City for The Spectator.

So, she’s the new Raj Persaud wannabe… just what we fucking need.