I met Emmy at her house in the outskirts of Sheffield. Our conversation covered therapy, politics, and her art [see also this month's special feature].
Do you think we’ve lost academic debate?
Certainly in the media. When I think back to 30 or 40...
therapy
I was interested to read the letter from Hugo Maximillian Metcalfe in the April issue of The Psychologist. He raises an interesting question: Why do we think that the standard...
For some time now our healthcare system has been struggling ‘to cope with the demands of acute care, let alone the needs of those with long term health conditions,’ (Barlow et al., 2002). As this struggle has intensified, the phrase ‘self-management’ has proliferated,...
Therapy is both art and science. We draw upon research as we practise naturally, but our craft is not so clear cut and limited as to be simply such-and-such an intervention to this degree and in that way. Humans are too messy. There are deeper waters in the human mind and...
In a May 2016 piece ‘Are we punching our weight?’, The Psychologist journalist Ella Rhodes noted that ‘an evidence-based approach to human behaviour is central to mental health,...
Before the start of a recent co-therapy session with my supervisor, she asked that I come with her to the room we had booked to ‘make sure it was OK’.
We entered and, as I have done myself countless times before, we arranged the furniture. Moving surplus chairs to the...
I read with interest the article entitled ‘Online mental health – Revolutionary help in higher education?’ (The Psychologist online, 9 August 2017). The author, Erika...
Hi Tony,
I’m sending you my opinion piece from The Lancet Psychiatry last year, ‘Failure is an option’. I call for more open discussion of failure rates in...
How do your ideas connect with your values?
I’ve tried in my career to be less concerned about brand names and personal applause, and more concerned about building community and connecting to this larger value of ‘how can we best serve people using...
Over the course of my lifetime I have seen five therapists for more than a session or two. Each time, without fail, I have encountered what I call the thin gaze and with it the assumption that I should want to lose weight. The thin gaze, arising from thin...