ARE YOU WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE?

About 25 years ago I went on a double date with a stripper. The stripper wasn't my date -- she was the across-the-hall neighbor of a female friend whom I was taking to see a play called "The Shadow Box." The stripper and her date joined us.

The stripper went by the stage name of Princess Cheyenne and, at the time, was a fairly well-known personality in Boston. I occasionally would read about her in the newspaper thereafter, but sometime around the mid-1980s she seemed to disappear from the scene.

Now she is back in the news. In October The Boston Globe reported that Lucy Wightman, the former Princess Cheyenne, had been "indicted on 26 counts of felony larceny, six counts of filing false health-care claims, six counts of insurance fraud and one count of practicing psychology without a license."

Wightman allegedly had passed herself off as a licensed psychologist, when in reality she had only a master's degree in counseling psychology and had never earned a Ph.D in psychology from any accredited institution, though she had purchased a Ph.D online.

Genuine psychologists, believing Wightman to be licensed, had referred patients to her. Some parents had taken their children to her for neuropsychological evaluations that Wightman was neither trained nor licensed to administer.

The Wightman incident -- her indictment, not my double-date with her -- created quite a stir in my household. My wife, a licensed therapist who earned the same master's degree that Wightman did, wondered what responsibility lay with the professionals who had referred patients to Wightman. Weren't they obligated to make sure that she had the credentials that she said or implied that she had?

Presumably the referrers didn't knowingly recommend an unlicensed practitioner -- if they had, they too would be in a heap of trouble -- but, even if they had no legal requirement to check out Wightman's credentials, didn't they have an ethical responsibility to make sure that she was on the up and up before sending patients to her? It's a question that reaches beyond the medical arena. Do we have an obligation to make sure that people are not faking their credentials when we're involved in recommending them or hiring them to do a job? If you're leading a search for a new employee, for example, and if no one else has verified the information on a promising candidate's resume, should you place a few calls to former employers or educators to confirm the information?

I would argue that, because of your responsibility to the company and to other employees, you should make those calls. It's not that I'm cynical and believe that most people provide false information, it's simply that checking out a candidate as thoroughly as possible should be a routine part of screening him or her for a job. If you're accepting anything he or she says at face value, you're failing to fulfill the basic idea of a screening.

In the Wightman case, the right thing would have been for the referrers to make sure that she -- and any other professional they recommended -- was qualified and licensed to do the work. While it might take extra work to check someone's credentials, mental health is too critical an issue to take anybody's expertise for granted.

There are times when, regardless of our efforts to check out someone's credentials, we are going to be duped by a clever hoaxster. Nonetheless we owe it to the people who might fall prey to such posers to make every effort to make it as difficult as possible for any deception to succeed.

c.2006 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)