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...
therapy
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...
On 27 August 1979, off the west coast of Ireland on a lovely sunny morning, a small boat, Shadow V, was blown to pieces by a 5lb gelignite bomb placed under the deck and activated by remote control by members of the IRA. Lord Mountbatten was at the helm. Also on board were...
Kirk Strosahl is co-founder of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), a cognitive behavioural approach that has gained widespread adoption in the mental health and substance abuse communities. He is the author of numerous books including Brief Interventions for Radical...
In the age of evidence-based therapy and the associated treatment manual, what of the evocative imagery of the ‘swampy lowlands’ of clinical practice described by Donald Schön (1983) more than 30 years ago? When the firmness of what appears ‘high, hard ground where...
An independent report by the Mental Health Taskforce, chaired by the Chief Executive of Mind, Paul Farmer, has set out recommendations for mental healthcare in the NHS. In the wake of this report, Prime Minister David Cameron called for greater focus on mental health in...
Psychologists from all corners of the discipline tend to work with people. We often hear about their lives, their hopes and fears, their highs and lows. But do they need to hear about ours?
As an example, consider working with people experiencing psychosis. Here,...
When someone undergoes psychotherapy, the hope, obviously, is that they will recover. But if they don’t, what is the worst that can happen? That the therapy will prove ineffective? In fact, therapy can be harmful, with research showing that, on average, approximately 10 per...