Thursday 18 September 2008
Quick fix for the soul
This article by Darian Leader and published in The Guardian newspaper on Tuesday September 9th 2008 makes plain part of the problem that lies behind the current governmental policy of supporting CBT as the the treatment of choice for the State. Follow the link in the title to find the page in the newspaper.
Monday 8 September 2008
Petition: HPC must think again. State reg of psy practice does not protect the public.
Nick Totton, Andrew Samuels, Allison Priestman, Denis Postle, Arthur Musgrave, Guy Gladstone, Kevin Jones have created a petition which now has 1226 signatures. Below is the text from the petition page, click the title of this blog entry to go to the petiton.
[Since launching the petition, we have been in touch with UKCP, BACP and BPC, as well as with the Health Professions Council, pointing out that large numbers of practitioners have signed up including many members of the big organisations, and suggesting that a poll of all therapists and counsellors needs to take place to find out whether state regulation has their support. So far only the HPC has responded, and we are setting up a meeting. If you want your professional organisation to poll its members on state regulation, then let them know! By the way, we are also aware of the double 'and' in the petition, but for obvious reasons we are not allowed to edit the text while the petition is 'live'. - Nick Totton, Andrew Samuels, Allison Priestman, Denis Postle, Arthur Musgrave, Guy Gladstone, Kevin Jones]
To: UK Government and Health Professions Council
We the undersigned psychotherapists and counsellors doubt that the proposed state regulation of psychotherapy and counselling in the UK will be of benefit either to the public or to the profession, and are concerned that it will in fact be harmful; we do not wish to be regulated in this way, and and call upon the Government and the leadership of our professions to halt the proc
[Since launching the petition, we have been in touch with UKCP, BACP and BPC, as well as with the Health Professions Council, pointing out that large numbers of practitioners have signed up including many members of the big organisations, and suggesting that a poll of all therapists and counsellors needs to take place to find out whether state regulation has their support. So far only the HPC has responded, and we are setting up a meeting. If you want your professional organisation to poll its members on state regulation, then let them know! By the way, we are also aware of the double 'and' in the petition, but for obvious reasons we are not allowed to edit the text while the petition is 'live'. - Nick Totton, Andrew Samuels, Allison Priestman, Denis Postle, Arthur Musgrave, Guy Gladstone, Kevin Jones]
To: UK Government and Health Professions Council
We the undersigned psychotherapists and counsellors doubt that the proposed state regulation of psychotherapy and counselling in the UK will be of benefit either to the public or to the profession, and are concerned that it will in fact be harmful; we do not wish to be regulated in this way, and and call upon the Government and the leadership of our professions to halt the proc
Petition against State regulation of psychological therapies
"The Government proposes to regulate psychological therapies through the Health Professions Council. Thousands of psychotherapists and counsellors working successfully in these fields would be barred from using their habitual and long-earned titles if the proposal to make ‘psychotherapist’ a protected title is approved.
Specifically, body-centred approaches, client-centred, humanistic and integrative psychotherapists rely on a model which emphasises self-actualisation and the intersubjective and relational nature of human development and experience.
These are not variants of the Department of Health preferred modalities, and often offer a more fundamental alternative to CBT and related outcome-focussed therapies, whose long-term effectiveness remains unproven.
The DH proposals have failed to make the case for regulation. There is no evidence of widespread client abuse. Current voluntary and professional arrangements already deal with client complaints and maintain professional competence in the field of psychotherapy"
started by Tim Brown – Deadline to sign up by: 25 October 2008 – Signatures: 220
Specifically, body-centred approaches, client-centred, humanistic and integrative psychotherapists rely on a model which emphasises self-actualisation and the intersubjective and relational nature of human development and experience.
These are not variants of the Department of Health preferred modalities, and often offer a more fundamental alternative to CBT and related outcome-focussed therapies, whose long-term effectiveness remains unproven.
The DH proposals have failed to make the case for regulation. There is no evidence of widespread client abuse. Current voluntary and professional arrangements already deal with client complaints and maintain professional competence in the field of psychotherapy"
started by Tim Brown – Deadline to sign up by: 25 October 2008 – Signatures: 220
Sunday 7 September 2008
Mark Neocleous
Prof Mark Neocleous teaches politics and government at Brunel University. In this conversation with Natalie Wulfing, he manages to laugh at the preposterous policy of the administrators at Brunel who are 'doing their bit' to defeat terrorism by trimming the foliage of the shrubbery:
MN: "... it doesn’t take much for a State to point to a whole range of insecurities and then to say that we, the State, must act. More interesting, more problematic, is that it doesn’t take much for the State to fabricate insecurities. Once that process takes place, it has a momentum of its own. There’s an interesting document produced by MI5 in 2004 and reissued in 2005 about how universities and large organisations can help in the ‘war on terror’. One piece of advice was to trim the bushes and small trees around entrances. Think about what that does. No terrorist attack has ever happened by a terrorist jumping out from behind a tree near an entrance to a building or planting a bomb there. My university actually did send an email around after this document arrived, and now the bushes at the doorways are all trimmed back! But think: how many times do people go in and out of their work or university building in a day? Now, every time they go through a door they are supposed to feel secure or insecure. So,
something as mundane as going for a sandwich becomes a question of security – or reminds people of their ‘insecurity’."
to read the full conversation, click the heading.
If you want to comment on it - click the comments box below.
MN: "... it doesn’t take much for a State to point to a whole range of insecurities and then to say that we, the State, must act. More interesting, more problematic, is that it doesn’t take much for the State to fabricate insecurities. Once that process takes place, it has a momentum of its own. There’s an interesting document produced by MI5 in 2004 and reissued in 2005 about how universities and large organisations can help in the ‘war on terror’. One piece of advice was to trim the bushes and small trees around entrances. Think about what that does. No terrorist attack has ever happened by a terrorist jumping out from behind a tree near an entrance to a building or planting a bomb there. My university actually did send an email around after this document arrived, and now the bushes at the doorways are all trimmed back! But think: how many times do people go in and out of their work or university building in a day? Now, every time they go through a door they are supposed to feel secure or insecure. So,
something as mundane as going for a sandwich becomes a question of security – or reminds people of their ‘insecurity’."
to read the full conversation, click the heading.
If you want to comment on it - click the comments box below.
Joanna Moncrieff
Joanna Moncrieff is a psychiatrist and a founder member of the critical psychiatry network. In this conversation Roger Litten reminds her of one of her early articles written when higher education was as yet unscathed by the RAE dis-ease.
“Its function was to deal with abnormal and bizarre behaviour which without breaking the law did not comply with the advance of the new social and economic order. Its association with medicine concealed that aspect of social control by endowing it with the objectivity and neutrality of science. The medical model obscured the social process of deviance by locating problems in human biology ...” In three sentences you have condensed a remarkably powerful nucleus.
JM: I wrote that when I was an SHO, a junior doctor. I wrote it for Soundings, which was then a new Open University magazine. It makes me feel sad as I sit here now in UCL! No-one would ever encourage me to write a paper like that today. I’ve got to write papers that get into the Lancet for the Research Assessment Exercise, so it’s difficult to find time and the outlets to write things like that which need to be written, which do actually get to the fundamental core of the issue...
to read more, click the heading of this blog entry
“Its function was to deal with abnormal and bizarre behaviour which without breaking the law did not comply with the advance of the new social and economic order. Its association with medicine concealed that aspect of social control by endowing it with the objectivity and neutrality of science. The medical model obscured the social process of deviance by locating problems in human biology ...” In three sentences you have condensed a remarkably powerful nucleus.
JM: I wrote that when I was an SHO, a junior doctor. I wrote it for Soundings, which was then a new Open University magazine. It makes me feel sad as I sit here now in UCL! No-one would ever encourage me to write a paper like that today. I’ve got to write papers that get into the Lancet for the Research Assessment Exercise, so it’s difficult to find time and the outlets to write things like that which need to be written, which do actually get to the fundamental core of the issue...
to read more, click the heading of this blog entry
Stephen Frosh
Prof Stephen Frosh used to work in the Science Faculty of Psychology at Birkbeck College in London. He now finds himself in the Arts and Humanities faculty heading up a new discipline called Psycho-social studies. In this conversation Stephen describes some of the process of audit that produces this unintended consequence and argues that what is needed is courageous re-invention, and on no account should academics lose their nerve.
SF: "... I think for instance here at Birkbeck, our audit culture is still laborious and bureaucratic but it’s much better than it used to be partly because the people involved are trying to think how to make it work. We should not be intimidated.
The person I teach most with is just coming out of the probationary period and she had to do the teaching certificate (a lot of people complain about it). She was observed and assessed doing some teaching with me of psychoanalysis to psychology students. What we did was to work in small groups and have an observed conversation: unstructured, unprepared, responsive to students – it was risky. The rather tight-looking observer from the Life Long Learning department gave her a distinction! There was a willingness from the observer, and an unwillingness from us to be completely phased. I’m not denying the power of audit here, but there is something that people can use more. It’s not quite as bad as it has to be, we must take hold of its power. "
To read the full conversation, click the heading.
To make a comment on what you read, click the comment button below:
SF: "... I think for instance here at Birkbeck, our audit culture is still laborious and bureaucratic but it’s much better than it used to be partly because the people involved are trying to think how to make it work. We should not be intimidated.
The person I teach most with is just coming out of the probationary period and she had to do the teaching certificate (a lot of people complain about it). She was observed and assessed doing some teaching with me of psychoanalysis to psychology students. What we did was to work in small groups and have an observed conversation: unstructured, unprepared, responsive to students – it was risky. The rather tight-looking observer from the Life Long Learning department gave her a distinction! There was a willingness from the observer, and an unwillingness from us to be completely phased. I’m not denying the power of audit here, but there is something that people can use more. It’s not quite as bad as it has to be, we must take hold of its power. "
To read the full conversation, click the heading.
To make a comment on what you read, click the comment button below:
George Freeman
Prof George Freeman is well known for his work on Continuity of Care in General Practice and for his GP teaching work. In this conversation he talks about some of the unintended and unwelcome consequences that audit culture visits on medical practice, including this rather bizarre example of managerial lunacy.
GF "... Here is a prescription pad...
JL: ... so it is ...
GF: ... if you were to steal that and attempt to forge my signature, you could write prescriptions for this that and the other for patients that might or might not exist, and then you might sell them. Alternatively there’s that [reaches to the paper tray in the
computer printer] it doesn’t even have anything printed on it except for a serial number, and again, apparently it has a market value. Obviously you are supposed to keep these locked – when I’m not here I lock them away. But there are concerns about
the safety, and we have a fifty-one page document now from the PCT about the safety of these things, and it’s really like Securicor! When they are unloading them from the van they’ve got to have a witness, they have to go into a room with grills on the windows, and someone has to witness them being locked up - and it take 51 pages to say that. That’s an example of the bureaucratic effort that’s going into administration these days: it’s disproportionate and it’s happening across the board.
To read the full conversation, click the heading above
To leave a comment, click the button below:
GF "... Here is a prescription pad...
JL: ... so it is ...
GF: ... if you were to steal that and attempt to forge my signature, you could write prescriptions for this that and the other for patients that might or might not exist, and then you might sell them. Alternatively there’s that [reaches to the paper tray in the
computer printer] it doesn’t even have anything printed on it except for a serial number, and again, apparently it has a market value. Obviously you are supposed to keep these locked – when I’m not here I lock them away. But there are concerns about
the safety, and we have a fifty-one page document now from the PCT about the safety of these things, and it’s really like Securicor! When they are unloading them from the van they’ve got to have a witness, they have to go into a room with grills on the windows, and someone has to witness them being locked up - and it take 51 pages to say that. That’s an example of the bureaucratic effort that’s going into administration these days: it’s disproportionate and it’s happening across the board.
To read the full conversation, click the heading above
To leave a comment, click the button below:
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