Licensed mental health professionals are required to receive between twelve and twenty hours of continuing education each year. Three of the required hours must be in professional ethics and law.

Our profession is developing at a rapid pace. New research and developments are occurring in defining the best practices in the field. New rules are being formed all the time to help professionals keep up with the pace of that development.

One such area is the ethics and best practices in dealing with families caught in the web of divorce.

When divorces turn ugly, sometimes couples invite numerous professionals into the fight. One of the strategies employed by divorcing couples is to make allegations about the fitness of their spouse as a parent, and seek sole custody, even threatening their partner with not being able to see their children. When accusations include charges of physical or sexual abuse during the divorce process, many professionals become involved, including attorneys and often numerous mental health professionals.

The most damaging divorces may involve "dueling mental health professionals," with each party hiring a professional to be on their "side," to say good things about their client and bad things about the other spouse they may have never met. Though clearer rules have been written in hopes of preventing mental health professionals from getting caught up in such fights, it still occurs.

When divorce fights escalate to this unfortunate point, often the professionals involved are participating in doing harm to their clients. We are aware of tragic cases in which the parties have run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses, and involved many of the custody evaluators, mediators, parenting coordinators, and mental health professionals in town.

Because of this fairly common occurrence, licensing boards have expanded the codes of ethics to define proper conduct for "forensic practice."

Also the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts recently convened a Task Force to study and develop guidelines to govern the best practices of professionals who seek to serve families during divorce. They have previously published the Standards of Practice for custody evaluators, parenting coordinators. Their most recent document, which is still undergoing review, is titled, "Guidelines for Court-Involved Therapists."

For some who have extensive experience in the court process with clients divorcing, some of the content in these guidelines seem like "common sense." Having sat on the licensing board and having reviewed complaints against numerous therapists for violating those principles, it has led me to believe that sense and training in this area is not common.

Written by Dale Doty, M.S.W., Ph.D.