Why Counsellors Need To Understand Economics.

Again and again I find myself having to start at the very beginning when it comes to explaining why we are where we are. Counselling is part of the everyday world, not something apart from it. We are subject to exactly the same forces, fashions and mindsets as everyone else.

It used to be that only rich ladies had the time, money and enough people telling them they were neurotic (poor women were just plain mad) to seek analysis. Over time therapy became more widespread but the rich were treated entirely differently from the poor. Officers in the First World War had "neurasthenia" while ordinary soldiers were often diagnosed with the "women's disease" of hysterics. Mentally ill poor people were punished and many (though by no means all) mentally ill rich people went on holiday for their 'nerves.' Still today, we see poor people under entirely ideological stress being punished for being stressed while when rich people who produce nothing and pay fewer taxes than poor people behave strangely are 'eccentric'.

Counselling buys into this. 

We treat the client as an individual. The concept of an individual is by no means universal and it is central to therapy:

"The right of the individual to freedom and self-realization"  

 is a socialist concept. (Developed because workers were treated in the same way as tools or machine parts and as a troublesome mass that should be starved to death for their own good.)

"Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values." 

is a quote from Ayn Rand, and indeed many of her most famous quotes might come from a counselling theorist. Read through a selection here. Really DO THIS before you stick an Ayn Rand motivational poster on your site, as any number of counsellors have done because they don't know who Ayn Rand was!

We blindly accept that 'The Market' rules our lives and the lives of our clients. If you accept that ethics are not applicable when you or your counselling agency are seeking funding then of course the market is in charge. Because you are allowing it to be. It's like standing in front of a lorry and blaming the lorry for running you over, because you can't possibly be expected to move.

Anyway, rather than write a thesis here, please take 10 minutes to watch this video from Ha-Joon Chang from the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge. 

Economics is not a natural law like the sun coming up or winter. We have choices. Who is benefiting from you believing  you have no choice?

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.

Embodying Social Justice Conference.

It's taken me some time to process this exciting two day event at Roehampton University and I'm sure it will continue to work and settle in for me. Here are my immediate observations:

1. Everyone I spoke with said how very tired they were. 
So many of us are in the maelstrom of heightened client distress. It used to be that people escaping domestic violence, child abuse, slavery, burnout, bereavement and other day to day unhappiness had services that would support and help them. The majority of those services have been closed. Those that remain have to divert the majority of their energy into non-counselling related activities to remain in existence. Many therapists are working incredible hours for no pay.

2. There was a real sense of muted outrage.
Counsellors in schools are under increasing pressure to inform on one section of their client base.
Many therapists are working 60+ hours a week for no pay.
The average annual income for BACP members is £12,000 - which means that many of us are paid much less.
Black and other minority counsellors remain just that - a tiny minority.
The body is being commodified as never before, from plastic surgery to FGM, worldwide.
Cuts and closures have affected everyone, vulnerable or not.
There was a sense of helplessness, knowing that people were suffering, knowing that organisations like the UN require a change in government policy and knowing that there will be no change.

3. 'Resilience' is still a focus for most of us.
Carmen Joanne Ablack opened the Conference with personal examples of suffering and resilience from within her own family, extending those stories to the wider experience of minority and other peoples. It was inspiring. But throughout the conference I heard very little about the people who suffer and continue to suffer; who don't experience some kind of growth or change; who kill themselves; who live on in a kind of fugue state whether they're in positions of privilege and power or living in abject poverty; who die because they've been forcibly relocated; who die because they're old or unwell and can't afford to turn the heating on. Or eat.

I wondered if these narratives are just too painful for us to consider. Once or twice in the sessions where we all met together a delegate would express despair and there were no answers to that despair.

4. Boundaries are being pushed further and further out in ways that might have been unimaginable 10 years ago. 
We continue to work within systems that treat Muslim children as potential terrorists.
We continue to work with government departments that are responsible for starving, purposefully harming and, in not infrequent cases, killing very vulnerable people.
We accept that counselling training is limited to people who can afford to pay for training, pay to work, pay to service counselling agencies, and so on and so on.
We accept that £12k is a reasonable return for a highly trained and highly regulated professional.

For me, these levels of consent can be perceived as symptoms of cumulative abuse rather than cynical acceptance of the status quo (thought there is certainly a significant proportion of counsellors who believe that people are hermetically sealed against their environment.)  We see people in terrible and escalating distress and want very much to do something to help even though we know the numbers are overwhelming, the pain unbearable. We don't dare to really look at how shocking things have become because they've become very, very bad indeed. The water is boiling. The frog died some time ago.

The Conference brought intelligent people of very good will together. I found a lot of solace simply in that. The fact that the Conference took place at all suggests that some change may be afoot, not least because it brought together academics, practitioners, researchers and the new, exciting Psychotherapy and Counselling Union which Susie Orbach suggested we join and support in order to address some of our concerns.

During the plenary session at the end of the conference key figures were asked to summarise what had been particularly important for them. Mick Cooper spoke about Lucy Goodison's workshop "The Red Therapy Experiment - compassionate embodied activism." Lucy co-founded self help, grassroots therapy groups in 70's East London and when asked, "What would you pass on?" she replied "Don't expect too much too quickly."*

We all have to find our place on various axes of what we can bear and not bear, of what we can offer and not offer. Because of my experiences - most recently becoming increasingly aware of elderly and vulnerable people dying just months after being forced to move during the 'regeneration' of our neighbourhood - I place myself in positions that many therapists may, because of their experiences, consider extreme. Death is about as extreme as it gets. Starvation, hypothermia, suicide attempts and successes, profound anxiety and total bodily State compulsion are extreme.

I've learned not to expect anything much in terms of political awareness from the profession so the Conference was refreshing and reinvigorating. I'm hopeful that the respectability of Mick Cooper and Susie Orbach, of Roehampton and Edinburgh Universities will encourage resilience in more counsellors who, like me, may feel very isolated in a sea of troubles. We may not be able to end them but together we can oppose them.



* I'm paraphrasing from memory: if you remember differently please let me know.

How Do We Know What We Think We Know?

Phenomenology – the study of experience and how we experience- and ephoché – putting aside our own experience in order to experience ‘things as they are’ ran throughout my counselling diploma. I found myself struggling with these concepts for years afterwards, gaining then losing understanding and then regaining some insight after sitting with clients who perceived their world in ways entirely different from my own. We shared the same world, the same part of the world but had very different experiences of it.

I still struggle with the concept of ‘things as they are’ and find myself wanting to contend first one way and then the other about how things are because it seems to me that there is no one understanding to be had.

Cognitive dissonance is well understood: we all want to limit the discomfort that holding two competing beliefs causes and so we either change our beliefs or we rationalise them. Since changing our beliefs begins with recognising that we are wrong most of us tend to find or create ‘facts’ to support our existing belief. We all do it because the alternative – to live in an eternal ephoché – means paralysis.

We all have cognitive biases too “tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment.

The Wikipedia page on cognitive bias is a CPD subject for counsellors in itself and I recommend spending time with it and some colleagues discussing it. Rather than plagiarise the entire page here’s a taster:

Base rate fallacy or Base rate neglect	The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, general information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case).[19]
Belief bias	An effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.[20]
Bias blind spot	The tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.[21]
Cheerleader effect	The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.[22]
Choice-supportive bias	The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.[23]
Clustering illusion	The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).[11]
Confirmation bias	The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.[24]
Congruence bias	The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.[11]
Conjunction fallacy	The tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.[25]
Conservatism (belief revision)	The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.[4][26][27]
Contrast effect	The enhancement or reduction of a certain perception's stimuli when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.[28]
Curse of knowledge	When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.[29]

There are about 30 further categories. Enjoy!

Just the stigma of being on benefits leads to homelessness.

Zineb's children stayed with her on a police waiting room floor

A mother and her three young children claim they were forced to spend the night on a police station floor after being being made homeless.

"It's hard to think of a worse time in the last 50 years to be on benefits and living in London. Soaring rents, a massive shortage of social housing and the effects of the benefit cap have left thousands of people struggling to find a place to live. Add to that the stigma which is now attached to claiming welfare and you have a situation which makes it almost impossible for the capital's poorest residents to find a home.

"These difficulties were highlighted by a recently leaked email from the estate agents Foxtons. It showed one of the company's employees trying to discourage a landlord from renting to people on housing benefit. Foxtons were quick to confirm that this isn't company policy and said they were disappointed to learn about the incident. But the attitude of the employee who sent the email will come as no surprise to anyone who receives benefits and has tried to rent a property in recent years."

Natalie Bloomer 

Money makes people right-wing and inegalitarian

Andrzej-Krauze

 

"Rich people typically lean right politically. Are they motivated by deeply moral views or self-interest? Andrew J Oswald and Nick Powdthavee argue that money makes you right-wing. It shows that lottery winners in the UK are more likely to switch their allegiance from left to right."

Why Therapists Should Talk Politics

"If the patient describes a nearly unbearable work situation, the therapist will tend to focus on the nature of the patient’s response to the situation, implicitly treating the situation itself as unchangeable, a fact of life. But an untenable or unjust environment is not always just a fact of life, and therapists need to consider how to talk about that explicitly.

"This is, in ways, an old quandary in psychotherapy. Should therapy strive to help a patient adjust, or to help prepare him to change the world around him? Is the patient’s internal world skewed? Or is it the so-called real world that has gone awry? Usually, it’s some combination of the two, and a good psychotherapist, I think, will help the patient navigate between those two extremes.

"When therapists make the dialogue only about their patient’s life narrative, without including a frank discussion of social and economic hardships, they risk reducing psychotherapy to a tool of social control. That might sound overly polemical, but consider a government proposal in Britain last year to put psychotherapists in jobs centers to offer counseling for the unemployed, with the unemployed possibly facing a reduction in benefits if they declined treatment. In such a situation, therapy could easily become an arm of the state, seeking to “cure” listlessness or a reluctance to work, potentially limiting social and political awareness among those it is intended to serve. " 

                                                                                                                                                             RICHARD BROUILLETTE

And of course, the government has indeed put therapists into job centres and many 

therapists have applied for and taken those jobs.  

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My Bookmarks file is huge and I'm going through it to see what links still work and what might be useful on this blog. 

The Adam Smith Institute is " is a right-wing think tank and lobbying group based in the United Kingdom, named after Adam Smith, a Scottish moral philosopher and classical economist"          (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith_Institute) 

In 2012 they published an interesting report on anti-poverty policies, summarised here.

From the poor law to welfare to work: what have we learned from a century of anti-poverty policies?

Examines the long-term effectiveness of strategies to reduce poverty and inequality, reviewing anti-poverty policies over the course of a century in the UK. Discusses the 'Minority report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws' published in 1909. Looks at policy initiatives from four time periods: 1905-42, when the Liberal government began to lay the foundations of the welfare state; 1942-79, which involved the foundation of the welfare state and the economic recession of the 1970s; 1979-97, when the New Right was championed by Margaret Thatcher and poverty and inequality rose rapidly; and 1997-2010, which involved the New Labour years and the deepest recession of the post-war period. Highlights the strengths and weaknesses of government interventions. Considers how the UK's performance compares internationally, noting that those countries with less poverty and income inequality than the UK generally have stronger welfare states and more active labour market institutions. Discusses social mobility, the Coalition's policies and the 'big society'. Suggests that redistribution, through welfare, is an essential part of the solution to combating poverty, along with pre-distribution policies, particularly in the labour market.

(my emphasis)

The report has been removed from their site and this summary is from Research Online 

I've written elsewhere about Adam Smith: he's a man that I might be very interested in spending some time with. As Deborah Boucoyannis writes:

Smith’s system precluded steep inequalities not out of a normative concern with equality but by virtue of the design that aimed to maximise the wealth of nations. Much like many progressive critics of current inequality, Smith targets rentier practices by the rich and powerful as distorting economic outcomes.

The Adam Smith Institute have used his name but, it seems, are disinterested in what he actually said. To the point where they have quietly removed their own research when its findings are in opposition to their own government reality.

Listening to white working class views of neighbourhood, cohesion and change

Before you begin reading this do an image search for "White Working Class"

This is the first image that presents itself and the rest are fairly depressing.






The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is "an independent organisation working to inspire social change through research, policy and practice," and their site is well worth spending some time browsing.


Here's one of their pieces of research on White Working Class communities, completed in 2011. How might these findings have changed in the last 5 years? UKIP is defunct after it's moment of glory in 2012 when 691 UKIP candidates in the May 2012 local elections. They won 13% of the vote. Many of these voters used to be traditional Labour voters; pre-2012 were they voting for Socialist society values or for their own individual prosperity?

Whatever the case, for many people "WhiteWorking Class" has become polite shorthand for unemployed, unemployable, ignorant, racist, scrounger. This research suggests something different.

". . . rather than the popular portrayal of a feckless mass, annexed in dysfunctional housing estates, our research paints a much more nuanced reality. People were diverse in terms of ethnicity, income and tenure and emphasised values of hard work, reciprocity and mutual support.

"Racism is never acceptable. This report demonstrates that it is not the domain of the white working class either. Extremist parties have been shunned by residents. These are super-resilient places, with people who simply want to be heard, valued and treated fairly rather than forgotten. Hopefully this is a message that will be heard and acted on. And the people I grew up with can stop being stigmatised and left to feeling 'last in line'. "

6 studies on how money affects the mind

“As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases,” he says in his talk from TEDxMarin. Through surveys and studies, Piff and his colleagues have found that wealthier individuals are more likely to moralize greed and self-interest as favorable, less likely to be prosocial, and more likely to cheat and break laws if it behooves them.

"The swath of evidence Piff has accumulated isn’t meant to incriminate wealthy people. “We all, in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives, struggle with these competing motivations of when or if to put our own interests above the interests of other people,” he says. That’s understandable—in fact, it’s a logical outgrowth of the so-called “American dream,” he says. And yet our unprecedented levels of economic inequality are concerning, and since wealth perpetuates self-interest, the gap could continue to widen.

"The good news: it doesn’t take all that much to counteract the psychological effects of wealth. “Small nudges in certain directions can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy,” Piff says. Simply reminding wealthy individuals of the benefits of cooperation or community can prompt them to act just as egalitarian as poor people.

"To hear more of Piff’s thoughts on the effects of having—or lacking—wealth, watch his compelling talk. Below, a look at some of studies from Piff’s lab and elsewhere.

Finding #1: We rationalize advantage by convincing ourselves we deserve it

The study: In a UC Berkeley study, Piff had more than 100 pairs of strangers play Monopoly. A coin-flip randomly assigned one person in each pair to be the rich player: they got twice as much money to start with, collected twice the salary when they passed go, and rolled both dice instead of one, so they could move a lot farther. Piff used hidden cameras to watch the duos play for 15 minutes.

The results: The rich players moved their pieces more loudly, banging them around the board, and displayed the type of enthusiastic gestures you see from a football player who’s just scored a touchdown. They even ate more pretzels from a bowl sitting off to the side than the players who’d been assigned to the poor condition, and started to become ruder to their opponents. Moreover, the rich players’ understanding of the situation was completely warped: after the game, they talked about how they’d earned their success, even though the game was blatantly rigged, and their win should have been seen as inevitable. “That’s a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage,” Piff says.

Finding #2: People who make less are more generous…on the small scale

The study: Piff brought rich and poor members of the community into his lab, and gave each participant the equivalent of $10. They were told they cold keep the money for themselves, or share a portion with a stranger.

The results: The participants who made under $25,000, and even sometimes $15,000, gave 44% more to the stranger than those making $150,000 to $200,000 per year.

Finding #3: People who make less are more generous…on the large scale

The study: A 2012 Chronicle of Philanthropy study examined Internal Revenue Service records of Americans who earned at least $50,000 in 2008, then charted charitable giving across every state, city and ZIP code in the US.

The results: On average, households that earned $50,000 to $75,000 gave of 7.6 percent of their income to charity, while those who made make $100,000 or more gave 4.2 percent. Rich people who lived in less economically diverse—that is, wealthier—neighborhoods gave an even smaller percentage of their income to charity than those in more diverse neighborhoods: in ZIP codes where more than 40 percent of people made more than $200,000 a year, the average rate of giving was just 2.8 percent.

Finding #4: Rich people are more likely to ignore pedestrians

The study: In California, where drivers are legally required to stop for pedestrians, Piff had a confederate approach a crosswalk repeatedly as cars passed by, trying to cross the street. He videotaped the scenario for hundreds of vehicles over several days.

The results: The more expensive the car, the less likely the driver was to stop for the pedestrian—that is, the more likely they were to break the law. None of the drivers in the least-expensive-car category broke the law. Close to 50 percent of drivers in the most-expensive-car category did, simply ignoring the pedestrian on the side of the road.

Finding #5: Poverty impedes cognitive function 

The study: In this study published a few months ago, researchers Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and others measured farmers’ mental function a month before their harvests (when they were hurting for money) and then again a month after (when they felt flush). In a separate part of the study, they had poor and well-off participants think about finances, then determined the participants’ cognitive performance.

The results: As Mullainathan details in The New York Times, the same farmers performed worse before the harvest, when they had less money, than afterward, when they had more. And not just a little worse: their I.Q. before the harvest was 9-10 points lower, the same detriment caused by an entire night without sleep. As for the other part of the study: when poor participants thought about finances, they performed worse. Rich participants weren’t affected at all.

Finding #6: Those with less are better at reading facial expressions

The study: In 2010, a series of studies out of UCSF asked more than 300 upper- and lower-class participants to analyze the facial expressions of people in photos, and of strangers in mock interviews, to discern their emotions.

The results: The lower-class participants were better able to read faces in both cases. That is, they exhibited more “emotional intelligence, the ability to read the emotions that others are feeling,” as one of the study authors told NBC. But, if upper-class participants were told to imagine themselves in the position of lower-class people, it boosted their ability to detect other people’s emotions, counteracting the blinders-like effect of their wealth.