Salford Poverty Truth Commission

If you live in the North West you could do a lot worse than visit the Salford Poverty Truth Commission. 

Church Action on Poverty have been active and ecumenical when it comes to dealing with the causes of poverty head on.

"We're launching the Salford Poverty Truth Commission on Friday 8 July at Eccles Old Town Hall: Book your place now!
Sponsored by the new City Mayor, Paul Dennett and the Bishop of Salford the Poverty Truth Commission is a unique and powerful way of developing new insights and initiatives to tackle poverty, building on successful initiatives developed in Glasgow and Leeds over the past six years."

Counsellors need to hear about poverty from the people affected by it, on their own terms rather than only ever from the perspective of the client/counsellor relationship. We make room for people to discover their agency: this is what it looks like when they take it.

Book your FREE space now.

Study Finds Racial and Class Discrimination in Psychotherapy

A new study suggests that psychotherapists are human beings in a society, subject to the same influences as other people in that society.

"Psychotherapists are not immune to the stereotypes that influence the decisions of other professionals," Heather Kugelmass, the author of the study, said. "Moreover, because therapists in solo private practice have high levels of professional autonomy, they have a lot of latitude to make decisions that are consistent with their biases." 

"Among those who were called back, however, Kugelmass found a disturbing trend. Once reached, white patients who sounded like they were middle-class were offered an appointment 30% of the time, while middle-class black women were offered an appointment 21% of the time and middle-class black men received such an invitation only 13% of the time. The offer for psychotherapy appointments also seemed to depend on gender and class divisions."

“For those [potential clients] who do persist in their search for care, every instance of blocked access means additional time and effort spent placing numerous phone calls to identify a psychotherapist willing to respond and accommodate their schedules. This is time and effort that those suffering from mental [health issues]—especially those of low socioeconomic status—do not have to spare.”

Managing the need to polarise.

Either you're for regulation or you're against it. Either you're for the law or you're against it. Either you despise white working class culture or you're a racist.

Counsellors and psychotherapists live in a world of nuance, listening very carefully to what people believe they're saying and actually say and attempting to discern what might actually be going on for them. But when it comes to diversity we still remain, as a profession, pretty blunt in our approach. We tend to be reactive rather than proactive - watching our professional orgs beginning to scrabble with excuses and pompous, unrealistic announcements

We . . . will continue to engage with the Joint Work and Health Unit to critically examine their ongoing work, to ensure that the full range of potential co-location options trialled are in the best interests of clients, and that the evaluations will be thorough and robust enough to pick up on all of our areas of concern.

is a good example of our need for status and our inability to acknowledge that there are huge holes in our experience and knowledge. The organisations involved in this Statement seem to have forgotten that this government dismissed their demand for regulation: they don't take us terribly seriously.

So, read Paul Mason's piece on why working class white children, particularly boys, are failing so miserably.

It was not always the case that ethnic-minority children did better than white English ones, but the reason why some of them do now is pretty obvious: their problem – racism – is defined; their language skills tend to be well-developed; their culture is one of aspiration; they have social and religious institutions that promote cohesion.

By contrast, the problem of poor white kids cannot be properly defined: not in the language of freemarket capitalism, at least. It has nothing to do with being “overtaken” – still less with any reverse discrimination against them.

It is simply that a specific part of their culture has been destroyed. A culture based on work, rising wages, strict unspoken rules against disorder, obligatory collaboration and mutual aid. It all had to go, and the means of destroying it was the long-term unemployment millions of people had to suffer in the 1980s.

At a time when we have come to believe that the individual is solely responsible for their own fate a little nuance, a little thought, a little emersion in the experience of the Other and a little reading of history will go a long way.

Evidence Based Practice

I don’t know whether it’s worth writing this piece.

This is the week when yet another report is churned out about how awful nursing care for the elderly is, an occurrence so regular that there’s no shock value to it any more. It’s the week in which PC Harwood is being charged with manslaughter two years after he was seen to belt a man who was walking away from him, and the week in which the Met cleared officers of any wrongdoing after they tipped a protestor out of his wheelchair and dragged him across the road “ . . . in his own interests.” 

It’s the week in which the abuses at a home for people with learning disabilities has finally been brought to light and the week in which the BACP has printed a three-page article in the guise of a letter denouncing the ‘wilding’ of psychotherapy as proposed by Nick Totten the previous month. Using words like ‘chaos,’ ‘unfounded,’ ‘unresearched,’ ‘mass destruction,’; so thoroughly demonstrating a complete lack of awareness – let alone understanding - of systems theory or even of basic  archaeological propositions while critiquing them without references; and coming too close to calling tribal people primitive exploitative slave keeping savages in comparison to the peaceful Utopia that we ordered, civilised people live in that the purpose for its publication is baffling, to me at any rate.

What links the first 3 events is that they are are massively regulated. It’s illegal to impersonate a nurse or a police officer. Police officers and nurses go through rigorous training and have to attend professional development events to maintain their registration. 

The Care Quality Commission

“Regulate, inspect and review all adult social care services in the public, private and voluntary sectors in England.”

are paid for with public money, is staffed by professionals who have passed many exams and who ignored what vulnerable people told them.

Regulation, registration, post-training education, writing essays, being in the job for many years, being valued with a publicly paid wage and being employed by a service that is respected and valued and as mainstream as it's possible to be is no guarentee of good practice.

This is also the week when a respectable, successful, accredited psychotherapist attached to GP’s surgeries was sanctioned by the BACP because an undercover reporter blew her cover. Not an ordinary client, not a GP, not her peers – and hey, she passed the Accreditation process, having

“ . . . achieved a substantial level of training and experience approved by the Association.”

which, despite its emphasis on inclusivity, totally missed the fact that she is a homophobic nightmare.

(It's worth noting the beurocratic/shambolic BACP response to the complaint:

"Without being well educated and having free legal help to interpret the BACP's jargon-dense literature and legal letters, I would have found the process incomprehensible and intimidating.")

I’m not sure it’s worth writing this piece because I’ve come to believe, more strongly than ever before, that psychotherapy and psychotherapists are just part of the problem, the problem being institutionalised fear and ignorance which leads to banal evil.

Speak with most individual counsellors and the conversation almost always goes along the lines of “Yeah, we know there are too many counsellors being churned out; we know accreditation means nothing other than that a person can tell the BACP what it wants to hear; we know we have to compromise ourselves beyond what we believe is ethical if we want a paid job.” And still, counselling organisations demand their counselling staff be BACP accredited: I can understand non-counselling employers wanting what they’ve been told is the best, but counselling organisations?

Psychotherapy and counselling are based on philosophical understandings about what it is to be human, fulfilled and unfulfilled, to have a life that has meaning and purpose or otherwise, what it is to be in genuinely therapeutic relationships. Our years of training are spent doing what exactly? Questioning ourselves, questioning our assumptions about the ways the world might be, learning some of the foundational beliefs and values – all of them complex and multifaceted – of people like Buber, Gendlin, Freud, Husserl, Satre, Foucault? Presumably this takes some intelligence and the ability to learn. And then what? Do we pass the test and carry on just as before but with a nice bit of paper, an increased sense of personal status and a language that allows us to believe we're capable of independent thought? With all this incredible knowledge, do we begin to wonder if we might choose to think even minutely differently from people who haven't had access to this privilege? Or do we totally succumb to the overculture?

Where are Therapy Today news pieces about the DWP receiving guidelines on how to deal with the increased risk of suicide in some claimants? Or the on going collapse of so much of the voluntary sector that counselling depends on? Or what happens to people who used to access those charities? Or the psychological impact of cuts to public services for users, or workers who are made redundant or who live in fear of redundancy? Or the well researched psychological fallout  of our bottomless pit of inequality? Or the overwhelming emotional changes in the national zeitgeist in an age of austerity? Or that "One in 20, or 340,800, British families live in "severe housing deprivation" – in overcrowded homes in poor condition, without a bath, shower or indoor toilet."

It's much easier to have a nice piece about how the tango is like therapy, to look inward and inward and inward, becoming more and more sterile. Or is it that counselling and psychotherapy actually have no relationship to the world of the client?

Who is asking why there are four times as many CDP pages in Therapy Today than there are jobs, and what that might mean? Who is asking why we do therapy at all, for whom and for what purpose and to what ends? And how are we – you, and you and you and I – demonstrating that?

Who is asking, “Who has the power here? Where does power lie in British psychotherapy and counselling?”

I hear a sound in the distance and fear it’s just an echo.

Income Typical?

This is a particularly interesting article from Ode Magazine, focusing on the 'Neuro-typical' brain.

Imagine if we did this with cultural distinctions (“People from Holland suffer from altitude deprivation syndrome”) or racial differences (“Eduardo has a pigmentation disorder because his skin isn’t white”). We’d be regarded as racists and nationalists. Yet, with respect to the human brain, this sort of thinking goes on all the time under the aegis of “objective” science.

There is no standard brain, no standard race, religion or standard culture.  And there is no standard class, either, even though the psychotherapy profession functions as one. Imagine if people were only allowed to train as counsellors and psychotherapists if they were white, middle class Christians . . . wouldn't there be uproar from within the profession itself, and from groups and individuals who use the profession?

I'd say that there's no outrage from outside of the profession because, for people on low incomes therapy is seen as an indulgence or something so far beyond cultural expectations that it doesn't come into awareness. Many of those people who do get free or low cost counselling are so grateful (in a different way from a paying customer-client who is paying for something that they can get anywhere) and feel cowed by the formality and intensity of this completely unusual experience that they conform to a role. (This is what research on the counselling of international students, genetic counselling, disabled clients, and all other client group/ therapist research proposes, which is why good therapists are concerned to be non-directive.)

There's no uproar within the profession because there's so small a group of therapists who've experienced meaningful poverty. One in five people in the UK suffers from enduring poverty - Google 'one in five poverty' for pages of stats: how reflective of society is psychotherapy? It's a circular problem - there are so few therapists who've experienced meaningful poverty that it's just not an issue.