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Tag: anxiety
A Poverty of Help: inadequacies of support to vulnerable persons in the UK healthcare system
This is the start of a collection of experiences of government-funded mental health service and medical service encounters conveyed to me by patients over the years. I will add more in time. Because of their prevalence, I thought I would start putting some of them together as an illustration of some of the bad practices…
Psychiatric Diagnosis Part 1: a guide and caution for the weary
This post seeks to give an overview of how upsetting or distressing human experiences can be viewed and categorised as illness, disease, defect, disorder or dysfunction requiring the special expertise of specific treatments, therapies, interventions and pharmaceuticals for effective ‘cure’. It is not my intention to devalue the choices exercised by patients who elect this…
Mental Distress and Suicide
Statistically, suicide is the highest cause of death in men between age 20 and 49. This is not to diminish the female suicide rate, merely to present statistics. And the suicide statistics are shocking, with greater numbers of men taking their own lives than are killed in road accidents, or by cancer and coronary heart…
Protected: The Outsider Part 3: whistleblowers, and surviving the inauthentic culture
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Considering Starting Psychotherapy or Counselling?
“Everything depends on inner change; when this has taken place, then, and only then does the world change.” Martin Buber Facts Here are some brief facts about Psychotherapy and Counselling: You don’t need to have anything ‘wrong’ with you to benefit from psychotherapy A psychiatric diagnosis is not required to understand, work with or overcome…
Dissociative Identity Disorder
Still Like A House Fractured? No, curiously I feel fractured but I see myself in the mirror and I’m whole, standing still like a house. The mirror may be fractured, but my eyes still swivel like windows in this head, guided by a nose that acts as a weather vane. I open and close my…
PTSD, cPTSD, and Dissociative Experiences
I wanted to write something about the relationship some of us have to traumatic experiences from our past. It seems important that I write this from an intuitive, non-technical place. For me, this is because intution – as opposed to fear – is what we need to develop regarding our power to manage our way…
On choosing a psychotherapist
When choosing the right psychotherapist it’s important to remember some basic facts about psychotherapy if you want it to work for you: Psychotherapy is founded upon a trustworthy, secure relationship. The best evidence from the longest-term study supporting psychotherapy’s effectiveness in helping people make changes in their lives says that the quality of the therapeutic…
Protected: Depression Part 4: downhill or uphill?
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Protected: Depression Part 2: a well-worn path
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Protected: The Outsider Part 2: living off-label
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CBT: a low-cost ‘cure’ for psychiatric ‘Illness’?
“The fact remains that the construct of psychiatric diagnosis and the construct of a psychological model aligning itself to it are both divorced from the actual, more complex and individuated realities of the particular patient and the individual practitioner. The technocratic relationship of the first denies the non-mechanistic, much more complex organic nature of the…
Protected: Personal Authenticity Part 3: the healing power of truth
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Protected: Self-Esteem: Social Worth v Existential Value
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Protected: Suffer the Little Children: neglect, abuse and its legacy for survivors
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Healing Minds: what works for you?
Often we are so socialised into looking to ‘professionals’ for their expertise that we forget that, prior to the boom in professions, we did a pretty good job of taking care of ourselves and one another. Family, neighbours, community, aunts and uncles, grandparents: all of these community bonds have been eroded by massive shifts in…
Change Your World: Self-healing and Loving Kindness
“What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?” ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau My strong personal belief is that it is in human nature to take care of other living things as a feature of our conscience. Sadly, many people are out of touch with this facility in themselves. I think if our culture retained the…
Protected: Existential Analysis: how I work with you
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Protected: Narcissistic Abuse Part 2: from darkness to light
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Narcissistic Abuse Part 1: heart of darkness
This post is not intended as a guide for diagnosing or labelling individuals, but instead highlights the detrimental effects narcissistic individuals (including sociopathic, psychopathic and other exploitative personalities) can have upon us. Being able to recognise some of these effects can help us protect ourselves and seek effective help in recovering from the toxic relationships…
The Outsider Part 1: clarifying our place in society
“You were born an original, don’t die a copy.” -John Mason If there’s one area of my work that I have a special interest in it’s working with people who feel like they don’t fit in or who find themselves rejected by or rejecting of the group. I wanted to start writing a series of…
Self-healing: a shift from pain to compassion in five minutes
Periods of mental distress are often characterised by a hyper-focus on our own struggles to the exclusion of everything else. In the midst of pain and suffering, loneliness and desperation we can end up so concentrated on the distressing aspects of our lives and on what is missing that we literally forget ourselves and what’s…
Choosing Public Sector or Private Therapeutic Support
Choosing between public and private psychotherapy, counselling and mental health support
Existential Analysis, Integrative Psychotherapy and Other Approaches to Helping
This is a somewhat contentious area for many practitioners because, as with most fields of endeavour, everyone has their own territorial imperatives and personal definitions. The terms counsellor, therapist and psychotherapist are, for example, often used interchangeably but do not necessarily express the same activities. So with that disclaimer, here is my simple outline of…
Mental distress: a sane response to an insane world
Is there something wrong with me? Or am I responding sanely to something wrong with the world?
Protected: A Guide to Making the Most of Psychotherapy Sessions
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