Good news. Nina Funnell has failed in her malicious campaign alleging I am faking my qualifications. AHPRA, the organisation regulating psychologists, has announced they are taking no action against me despite Funnell’s efforts to have me punished for allegedly misrepresenting my clinical psychology qualifications.
Funnell, one of the activists responsible for bullying universities into setting up kangaroo courts, launched the first attacks on me after the announcement of my Honour award on Australia Day.
That weekend, writing in New Matilda, Funnell and her editor & co-writer, Chris Graham, revealed their results of a two-year investigation into my qualifications. I refuted their misleading allegations here.
Now AHPRA has determined Funnell’s hit job has no substance. Their letter to me suggests some minor changes in the language I use to refer to my clinical psychology background. So instead of speaking about my “training in clinical psychology” I will now just refer to the fact that I completed a Master of Clinical Psychology degree at UNSW. After AHPRA decided not to take action after the previous complaint about me late last year, I wrote to the organisation explaining that I planned to use that reference to my training and asked them to clarify whether that was appropriate. I had no response. Clearly the organisation now feels the need to be more specific – which is fine by me.
They acknowledge the problem of controlling how the media labels me – amusingly, New Matilda referred to me as a “clinical psychologist” in the captions to their hit piece. But AHPRA advises every effort should be made to get that right and where possible to clarify descriptions in interviews shown on video and online, including descriptions on overseas editions of my books. I am in the process of doing that now – not such an easy task. Currently google has over 2.3 million hits listed under my name.
Recently we saw the perfect illustration of my central argument that professional backgrounds are often included in descriptions well-known people use to describe themselves. This is common practice for doctors like Bob Brown, despite them no longer being in practice or registered.
At the first public hearing of the Family Law Inquiry at Canberra, Megan Mitchell, the National Children‘s Commissioner introduced herself stating; “I’m a psychologist by trade”. She is not a registered psychologist. I don’t suppose Funnell will do a hit job on Mitchell.