@afewbugs @b_cavello Right. That's why I was trying to draw a distinction earlier between that deference to a certifying body vs. learning from the established practices! I certainly think that a lot can be learned from existing practices, even if I don't trust the certifying bodies to have people's best interests in mind, and that a lot *should* be learned from them.

I do feel somewhat qualified to speak on this because I've already been providing informal therapy on an ad-hoc basis in the past, with good results, and have learned a lot from diving into the existing practices. Psychology is somewhat of a special interest that's morphed into a form of activism for me, and I'm also pretty familiar with all the ways in which it can go wrong.

That certainly doesn't mean I'm an expert on everything, and there are problems and topics I absolutely won't touch because I don't know enough about them to know where all the 'mines' are, but I do feel that there's a lot of room for mutual therapy as long as those risks are recognized, especially in currently underserved communities.

(The reason for asking the original question is that I'm looking into making this a bit more of a publicly-offered thing, and also training others on how to provide it, to start up building a different kind of mutual support network that's currently either highly dependent on the state or just completely missing)