Dear colleagues,
The Alliance has taken a lead in organising two recent press letters, aimed at the election campaign, on government policies around people with disabilities and the nation’s mental health.
In the Daily Mirror:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/must-defeat-tories-sake-mental-10494187
And last week, this appeared in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/18/vote-labour-to-uphold-the-rights-of-disabled-people
For us, an important and exciting development over the past few years has been the involvement of therapists in campaigns of a wide nature, including disability, psycho-compulsion, workfare, benefit cuts, and mental health. Crucially, these have been campaigns in which psychotherapists, counsellors, psychologists and other professionals have for the first time joined service users and welfare campaigners to plan and participate in protest, political lobbying and street actions on issues of social and psychological politics.
The initiatives for these alliances and for a more strident intervention in the social and political field have not come from the establishment of our profession (the regulatory professional bodies like BACP, UKCP, BABCP, BPC, BPS and RCP) whose voices have been slow to rise above the careful comprises of ‘realpolitik’, but from the growing energy of radical, more grass-roots organisations like the Alliance, Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility, Psychologists for Social Change, the Free Psychotherapy Network and the Social Work Action Network.
If you agree with the broad sentiments in the letters, we’d be most grateful if you would circulate and share the links far and wide through all your networks, including tweeting and social networking.
You can for the moment contribute your own comments below the line of the Mirror letter – please do! Thanks very much for your support.
Our warm regards,
Paul Atkinson (for the Alliance)
The Alliance for Counselling & Psychotherapy 
I moved to Norwich from London in the early eighties because I had heard SO MUCH about the University of East Anglia’s Student Counselling Service,Professor Brian Thorne was then Director of Student Counselling .