The State of Psychology in Ecuador

Psychology here in Ecuador is a strange thing. Firstly, there is currently very little legal protection over the professional title, anybody with a degree in psychology is a ‘psychologist’. I could legally set up private practice here as a Clinical Neuropsychologist if I wanted to, despite having no clinical training. Indeed there are lots of ‘Clinical Psychologists’ here who have no clinical training. Their titles being based on postgraduate academic qualifications from abroad. Ironically, those who do have clinical training usually only have an undergraduate degree in ‘Clinical Psychology’. So most trained clinical psychologists have no postgraduate qualifications.

There is also a tendency to faddishness. Sub-academic pseudo-psychology is peddled by numerous life coaches, brain trainers, aroma therapists and other cranks. When professional psychology is considered an undergraduate degree, then this is understandable. Many students are just not sufficiently trained to spot pseudoscience. Not surprisingly, what passes as mental health care sometimes borders on superstition and charlatanism. For example, I’ve heard of some ‘clinical psychologists’ using tarot cards as part of their therapy, others horoscopes. Many use hypnotic regressions to ‘past lives’.

How can a country have gotten to a state where graduates (aka Clinical Psychologists) think that tarot and horoscopes are real psychology? One reason is that supernatural beliefs are very common here anyway, so things like tarot are respected by the public and tend to go unchallenged. Another issue is the lack of expertise in Ecuador, there are simply not enough people in the country with doctorate qualifications to staff the universities. Thus, many professors have only masters degrees, and of varying quality at that. Worse, for many years there were few checks on the validity of qualifications, and so there are professors here with PhDs that were bought over the internet. These frauds are the likely source of much of the full-blown mumbo jumbo that passes as psychology. When ‘real’ psychology is taught, it’s frequently based on pop-science paperbacks and TED talks, with little distinction made between entertainment and academia.

Fortunately, the current government is taking steps to improve standards in higher education. For example they are recruiting more experts from abroad and sending Ecuadorian students to top universities in the USA and Europe for postgraduate training (there are very few postgraduate opportunities within Ecuador). The students get their fees paid and generous grants if they agree to return to Ecuador afterwards. The government is also checking all professors’ qualifications and adding the details to an open-access database, so the public can check who really has professional training. In addition, legal steps are being taken to require a postgraduate qualifications for professional psychological practice. With time these steps should improve the current dire situation nationally.

Independent of the government provision, at Universidad San Francisco de Quito we now have the best trained psychology faculty in the country, including several professors with (real) doctorates from respected universities in North America. Some of these are Ecuadorian, some foreigners. We have brought skills in research and clinical work that have generally not been available in Ecuadorian psychology departments before. The potential therefore exists to greatly improve psychology training, and over time, the quality of mental health care provided by the country's next generations of psychologists.