The Psychotherapist-Patient Privilege in Group Therapy

Abstract

Although the principle of confidentiality between psychotherapists and their individual clients is firmly established throughout the United States, the application of the confidentiality principle to group therapy is far less well recognized and understood by therapists. A few states offer explicit statutory protection for disclosures made in group therapy, and some others have judicially recognized such a privilege. In many states, however, neither a statute nor a court case recognizes a grouptherapy privilege. As a result, therapists in some jurisdictions may be laboring under the false assumption that client disclosures made in group settings are privileged and
thus protected from court-mandated disclosure until an explicit exception applies. A corollary problem arises because, generally, even in those jurisdictions that extend an evidentiary privilege to group disclosures, no mechanism exists to enforce the privilege against group members. In this article, the authors suggest a means for strengthening the group privilege, modeled after the approach used in Washington, DC.