The Other Side of the Wafer-Thin Barrier

This week, SOAP (Speak Out Against Psychiatry) held a demonstration at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. It follows a long period of widespread criticism of the DSM and its political influence.
I'm with the SOAP people in spirit, because I think someone needs to hold up a mirror to psychiatry, and I hope that psychiatry will be smart enough to look earnestly at itself.

I've written a little about this (see here and here) but I am by no means the most vocal critic or the most prolific writer on the DSM5 and all its problems. A good distillation of the issues, which is kept up-to-date with current material, can be found on the Beyond Meds blog - the DSM update page is here.

The SOAP web page for this event is well worth a read. There, they explain their position that human suffering is more than a medical issue, and so we should not rely upon a medical treatment for wider problems. Normal human experiences, they say, are being medicalized which results in people being labelled.
I agree, and have agreed for some time.  The DSM5 threatens to turn grief into a disorder, and child tantrums into a disorder. This is a dangerous form of 'mission creep'.

My instinctive opposition to diagnostic labelling comes, I think, from what I have learned in my training and experience as a psychotherapist. I have also had some experience of the mechanisms of psychiatry and psychopharmacology, which lead me to believe that both practices have departed significantly from what I hold to be the work of healing mental illnesses.

An article shared on Twitter recently notes that "Psychiatry was not - on Freud's watch - to be swallowed by medicine". Perhaps Freud intended that psychoanalysis be practiced by people who did not go through the sheep-dipping of medical training, and who could connect in a different way to their 'patients' as a result. Clearly, Freud knew that looking at people through a medical lens could be an inherently limited approach.

It's interesting to note the boundaries getting fuzzy here, between psychiatry (which is a branch of medicine) and psychotherapy. It's true that some psychiatrists are also trained psychotherapists who have undertaken extensive personal therapy themselves. But it's true too that many psychiatrists are just doctors. Some of these doctors are working on the assumption that their medical degree and psychiatric training entitles them to carry out psychotherapeutic enterprises under the banner of psychiatry. They also work on the assumption that their medical training (and with this I include the social, cultural, and heirarchical effects of medical and psychiatric training) will not somehow infiltrate the relationship, and the treatment that they offer. As if the person that we are, and the experiences we have, can somehow be irrelevant once we are in the room with a patient.

No.

The article also quotes Robert Spitzer, who headed the development of DSM-III. In a hugely telling remark, he is reported to have said: "..looks very scientific..... It looks like they must know something". For me, this is symbolic of the eternal struggle of medicine as a science - to name, to understand, and thus to defend against the impossible anxiety of NOT knowing.

"The medical model is a wafer-thin barrier against uncertainty" - Irvin Yalom

So, I question psychiatry as it's practiced today because of its over-emphasis on naming, and understanding stuff - much of which (like grief, tantrums, and the stress of someone's death) is actually the stuff of LIFE and not really there to be understood through a medical model.
I want to be prepared to sit on the other side of that barrier, where there is chaos, confusion, or hurt, and allow that to be the stuff. Because that's what I believe people want and need from soul-healing.

Here's the article, by the way

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I'm featured in the Colchester Gazette

This week I was interviewed by the Colchester Gazette, for a feature on people & their work.

I explained how & why I came into psychotherapy as a job (actually a vocation), and what it's like to be a psychotherapist.

It also gives a good sense of how I view the role of ongoing therapy; during training and beyond. Not everyone in the 'trade' is with me on this one, but I am happy that my view is fairly represented.

It's not the best photograph of me, but at least it gives the right representation - I'm ready to listen!

Read the article here 

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Guest Blog for Colchester Circle

This week I am pleased to be working in partnership with Colchester's lifestyle magazine, the Colchester Circle.

I have written a post, aimed mainly at people in a relationship who might be thinking about what's good (and what's not so good) about it.

Click here to go the site and have a read!

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A Prayer Poem (read at risk of being inspired)

A lot has been going on in the world in the last days & weeks. It's a constant stream of sadness, anger, frustration, disappointment - you name it. A Twitter-correspondent recently noted that she found the newspaper she'd bought "thoroughly depressing".
I guess we do live in a world that looks like that.

Religious or not, one can perhaps find some inspiration in this prayer-poem that I stumbled across some time ago. Someone - I know not who - had pinned it onto the office wall, for all to see. Now I'm pinning it here!
What I like about this prayer-poem is that it takes the disappointment and hurt, and transforms it - into a reason to be compassionate. How lovely. I hope it stimulates some helpful reflection for you too.

Sometimes, Lord,
it just seems to be too much:
    too much violence, too much fear;
    too much of demands and problems;
    too much of broken dreams and broken lives;
    too much of war and slums and dying;
    too much of greed and squishy fatness
        and the sounds of people
            devouring each other
                and the earth;
too much of stale routines and quarrels,
    unpaid bills and dead ends;
too much of words lobbed in to explode
    and leaving shredded hearts and lacerated souls;
too much turned-away backs and yellow silence,
    red rage and bitter taste of ashes in my mouth

Sometimes the very air seems scorched 
    by threats and rejection and decay
        until there is nothing
        but to inhale pain
            and exhale confusion.
Too much of darkness, Lord,          
    too much of cruelty
        and selfishness
            and indifference…
Too much, Lord,
    too much,
        too bloody,
            bruising,
                brain-washing much.
 Or is it too little,
    too little of compassion,
    too little of courage,
        of daring,
        of persistence,
        of sacrifice;
    too little of music
        and laughter
            and celebration?
O God,
make of me some nourishment
    for these starved times,
        some food for my brothers and sisters
    who are hungry for gladness and hope,
        that, being bread for them,
    I may also be fed
        And be full.


"Sometimes, Lord, it just seems to be too much" 
- from the book "Guerillas of Grace" by Ted Loder 

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