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.  

Book Review: Understanding the interpersonal dimension of gender and poverty

 There are many minds in the international development field that will switch off at the sight of the word gender in the title of this book. They may say they are concerned with more important, big-picture ideas about aid, governance, trade policy, etc. This is a problem, because those very same big ideas that dominate the field keep breaking down at the seams because their thinkers overlook exactly the kinds of nuance and detailed policy thinking that fill this book. So let me assure such thinkers that this is not a feminist text, nor does it fetishise the issue of gender. Rather it is about the interpersonal dimension of development—how women and men relate with each other, how children relate to adults, the old to the young, employers to workers, households to agencies. It is about how these relationships shape individuals’ struggles with poverty, and how these struggles aggregate to become wider narratives of poverty across whole societies.

Please read the entirety of this review which deconstructs the Protestant Work Ethic thus:

In one scheme in Dar es Salaam, analysed by Fauzia Mohamed, Lecturer in Sociology in the Open University of Tanzania, the credit agency seems eager to promote a Protestant work ethic, which presumably they find lacking in Tanzanian society. One official states that:

“We try to enlighten our clients that those who are serious in their businesses are the ones who escape the vicious cycle of poverty, since the harder they work, the faster they make their repayments. This gives them more money to invest in their businesses causing their businesses to expand faster, giving these women more money which will eventually reduce their poverty.”

Firstly, the statement shows that the agency prioritises recovering its funds ahead of real poverty alleviation, since women are taught that repaying the agency is a precondition for escaping poverty, a strange and artificial claim. Secondly, for Mohamed, it showed no understanding of Tanzanian women’s lives.

In the absence of other available criteria, the agency assessed individuals’ capacity to borrow based on their apparent industriousness and devotion to income-earning activities. But this directs loans only at those women who have the luxury of time and resources to devote themselves to income-earning, and writes off the neediest women where they don’t demonstrate the appropriate work ethic.

But the neediest Tanzanian women are not lazy, merely sensible. They are already industriously juggling children, domestic chores, and favours for neighbours. They may neglect repayments not out of incapacity but out of rational preference to maintain good relations with their community instead of credit agencies. Women may default to help their neighbours, causing agencies to refuse them further funds, but these women know that their neighbours are more likely to be of real assistance than the agencies in times of crisis, and will happily divert their repayments to help each other.

Little England

The media has been alive with opinion today about giving prisoners the vote.

Instinctively, I feel that prisoners should have the vote but until today I didn’t know what principals informing that feeling might have been. I spent much of this morning listening to radio and TV debates and was struck at how uninformed much of the reaction was.


'It's disgusting that Rose West be able to vote!' (She won't.) 'How can the Yorkshire Ripper be trusted to make laws?' (He won't.) What about the hundreds of people who were sent down for not having television license? Do they fall into the same category as Ian Huntley? What about the huge numbers of people who are imprisoned for under a year for minor, non-violent crimes? What about therapists who enjoy a spliff now and again, or don’t declare all their clients to HMRC – if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime!

 “Never mind prisoner rights, what about victims rights?” is a common refrain and whilst some of the sentences that some prisoners get can be surprisingly short, the impulse for this argument doesn't seem to have it's genesis in social justice. If I attack you then indeed I forfeit my right to liberty and free association, that’s part of the social contract. But I pay my debt to society, not to my victim. Society condemns certain acts and demands certain penalties. The ‘victims rights’ argument seems to want to replace our current legislation with systems of vendetta and feud, or Lex talionis that is, laws based on retribution, but I guarantee that the majority of people advocating this route would be horrified at the concept of living under Sharia.

 

It’s a given that poor people have more to do with the criminal justice system than do the rich and it’s also a given that societal debate makes and changed laws. That’s why people were imprisoned for not having a TV licence in the first place (Conservative rhetoric hated single mothers) and why that law changed, why we hanged children for stealing food and then stopped that barbarity.

 

Many talk radio programmes today debated this issue and I was struck by the almost total lack of ability or desire to hear any argument other than hang ‘em and flog ‘em and Sod Off Europe. In fact, the European Union came into being after WW2 urgently recognising the wisdom of that old saw, ‘United we stand, divided we fall.’ The European Court of Justice was part of this union, created to protect ordinary people from tyrannical governments and legislatures. Giving prisoners the vote, as all but we and the least developed of European countries already do, is a way of making sure that if any European government imprisons their opponents their opponents can still vote them out. Winston Churchill was an enthusiastic advocate for both the Union and the Court.

 

It’s a depressing fact that those people most likely to be imprisoned are also most likely to support a return to the death penalty. What is this about? How does it relate to Rogers’ understanding of the phenomenological field?

All individuals (organisms) exist in a continually changing world of experience (phenomenal field) of which they are the centre.
The organism reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived. This perceptual field is "reality" for the individual.
The organism reacts as an organized whole to this phenomenal field.
A portion of the total perceptual field gradually becomes differentiated as the self.
As a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluational interaction with others, the structure of the self is formed - an organised, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the "I" or the "me", together with values attached to these concepts.

The best vantage point for understanding behaviour is from the internal frame of reference of the individual.

And so on.  

 

There’s a particular kind of response from voters that politicians play to: “I’m not that cruel, I’m not that clever.” People on the Left are parodied as going into too much detail for too long ("Who cares about your stupid facts and figures, they bore and confuse me,")  people on the Right as callous thugs (US research is clear that Republicans give more financially and in time to charity than do Democrats. No such research exists in the UK.)  and voters find their place on that spectrum. Literacy is below the level expected of an eleven year old for one third of our adult population and poor academic achievement disproportionately affects people on low income. Cui Bono?

 

We had a learning moment earlier this year, when those people whose privileged education helps them bring together history, social policy, politics, economics and philosophy could have guided the nation, comfortably within their own political ideologies, to an informed decision about this European Court judgement. Instead, the Prime Minister summed up all their bombastic rhetoric and played to the gallery:

‘Being forced to give prisoners the vote makes me sick.’

David Cameron, 
November 2010

  “The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.”

                                                                                                                              Winston Churchill, July 1910

Is welfare spending ever under control?

Erm . . . data anyone?