Letter submitted to Therapy Today (the BACP journal) but not published.
I’d like to respond to Catherine Jackson’s interesting article ‘Colocation or collusion? How ethical are the Government’s proposals for closer working between IAPT services and Jobcentre Plus?’ (Therapy Today, April 2016, pp.8-9).
Catherine’s title suggests that the issue is generating heat and, at the end of this letter, I make a suggestion for a dialogical, relational next step.
What Catherine wrote illustrates the usual dilemma that the large professional organisations find themselves in with regard to Government policies – in this case, the many linkages between employment on the one hand and psychological therapies on the other. If bodies such as BACP, UKCP, BPC, BPS and BABCP are too robust in their criticism of Government policies, they will be labelled as ‘the awkward squad’ and ‘the usual suspects’. Doors in Whitehall close, requests for meetings go unanswered or evaded. That doesn’t serve the interests of the members. But what if they are too compliant, too accepting and even collusive with Government policy? What if the Big Five (as I call them) have inadvertently fallen into a role as being one of passing on reassurance to their memberships about the reassurance they themselves have received from the Department of Work and Pensions? That isn’t what members expect either.
I suspect that getting this particular balance right matters a lot to BACP members – it certainly did at the UKCP when I was Chair and the conundrum continues to be frequently discussed there. It is a really difficult balance to achieve. Be that as it may, Catherine’s article describes a significant new development in the field, in which 17 separate organisations have united to make the claim that the Big Five professional bodies referred to may need to do more to bring to the attention of their members what the overall thrust is of the linkages being made at many levels between employment and ‘mental health’. These 17 organisations include service user/survivor groups working alongside organised groups of professional counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, mental health nurses and academics. In all my 44 years as a therapist involved with public issues, I cannot remember anything like this happening before. It’s really important that BACP, in particular, with its deserved reputation for being the most outward-oriented of all the big professional bodies, clocks the significance of what has happened; I hope that the recognition of the importance of user-professional co-operation is not being too slow to arise. (See Note 1, below, for a roll call of the organisations concerned; the names tell their own story.)
In the public correspondence between the Big Five and the 17 organisations challenging them, there seems to be one point of agreement – at least in the abstract, at the level of principle. This is that therapy which has employment as a specific goal stated in advance is questionable from clinical and ethical standpoints. This is what the memberships of the Big Five believe, I think, and hence it is what they expect their leaderships to support.
But there is an increasing amount of ‘therapy-for-work’ being offered in Britain today and the Big Five know about it. Not least, their websites carry adverts whose job descriptions make it clear that the client’s employment is to be the clinical goal of the therapist that will be appointed. To be clear: the main issue here is not that our organisations carry the adverts. The thing is, now it has been pointed out, it is a little problematic to go on saying that this is not happening on the ground. The evidence is very close to hand. Or, to give a further and more general example, the New Savoy Conference, of which four of the Big Five are members, has been explicit that the stated clinical goal of psychological therapy should be employment. IAPTs, too, follow the same line, as Catherine mentions.
Counsellors and psychotherapists, who bring psychological perspectives to bar on public affairs, will understand that the proposals to locate ‘therapy’ in job centres will have (and has already had) a profound emotional impact. Counsellors and psychotherapists all know that the line between ‘suggestion’ and ‘compulsion’ is a very difficult one to demarcate. Vulnerable people can and often do say ‘No’ to what they believe will damage them, no matter how well intended. But, as therapists, shouldn’t we be concerned at what a false compliance does to the emotional state of an individual going through a difficult time?
Returning to the suggestion I flagged up in my opening paragraph, how about BACP convening a Stakeholders’ Meeting at which these matters can be more deeply explored. The Big Five plus the 17 smaller organisations would be at the core of such a gathering. Whether the Department of Work and Pensions would attend is something to discuss.
Andrew Samuels
Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex; former Chair, United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy
Note 1
The organisations referred to are: Mental Wealth Foundation, Mental Health Resistance Network, Disabled People Against Cuts, Recovery in the Bin, Boycott Workfare, The Survivors Trust, Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy, College of Psychoanalysts, Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility, Psychologists Against Austerity, Free Psychotherapy Network, Psychotherapists and Counsellors Union, Critical Mental Health Nurses’ Network, Social Work Action Network (Mental Health Charter), National Unemployed Workers Combine, Merseyside County Association of Trades Union Councils, Scottish Unemployed Workers’ Network, National Health Action Party
