Our rich heritage – are we building upon it or destroying it? (or ‛Why are counselling psychologists not angrier with clinical psychologists?’)

A paradox haunts the psychotherapy professions. Whilst talking therapies are ostensibly being promoted within the NHS, Counselling (and Clinical) Psychology is being destroyed. The rich and complex discourse of 120 years of psychotherapy, with its attention to the nuances of individual experience, is collapsed into comparisons of specific protocols for specific diseases. This trend currently finds its zenith in the deeply malign NICE guidelines, which explicitly endorse a medical model. Decades of deconstruction of ‘mental illness’ and examination of the sociocultural-political context in which mental distress evolves have been discarded in a vulgar exuberance over favourable comparisons between CBT and SSRIs. That psychologists, and the British Psychological Society, have colluded in this betrayal of our professions through an endorsement of the crude medical model of NICE is deeply puzzling - a phenomenon that itself deserves careful study. A further paradox is that behind the tawdry glamour of IAPT and dumbed-down forms of CBT, there are exciting developments that hold out the possibilities of real healing of psychological distress.