MEDIA

ALL CHANGE

So our big date with democracy has finally been set: There will be a general election on July 4.

Who will you vote for?

After 14 years of Tory misrule, Britain has lost its way. The old flag lies tattered and torn. The NHS is on life support. The welfare state has been slashed. Scotland is backing away, trying to secede, and who could blame them? With unprecedented levels of poverty, inequality and despair, we are suffering a massive collective hangover.

Did it really happen?

Read more

Me and my shadow

Are you a good person?

Are you kind to fellow humans—and all creatures great and small?

Do you support worthy charities, help those in need, and do good work?

Or do you have a dark side? Is there part of you that wants to lie and cheat and manipulate situations to your advantage? Are you interested in enriching yourself—even if that comes at a cost to others?

The answer is: All of the above. In the fine words of that great philosopher Paul McCartney: There is good and bad in everyone. Humans are capable of astonishing acts of courage and bravery, but under certain circumstances we might be utterly spineless, cruel, greedy or depraved. To deny these things in you—what Carl Jung called the shadow—is to project them unconsciously onto others.

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Our father

My Dad died recently.

He’d been bedbound for the better part of a year, and he was unhappy about that, and he was suffering a great deal at times. At the age of 98, he’d had enough.

We had a few brief conversations about death. He was driven by fact and reason and was not a religious man—“when you die, that’s the end of it,” he would say. But even without the prospect of being greeted by heavenly cherubs or reunited with my dear old Mum or any kind of afterlife, he so wanted to go. He would wake from a doze and shake his head in disbelief that he was still alive. In a recent Christmas card—his home-made cards, marvels of eccentric design, were legendary—he wrote simply: “Still here. I know not why.”
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Resisting the rise of psychofascism

When a well person blames an ill person for their illness through the use of psychological interpretations, meanings and explanations, I call it psychofascism.
Here is my opinion piece in the November 2022 edition of Therapy Today.

The Humanity Test

Reviews:
"This is a wise and fascinating account, written accessibly by someone who is a reliable guide to the worlds of disability and psychotherapy, because it’s exactly where he lives. I trusted him immediately and recommend this book to all."
--Tom Shakespeare, Professor of Disability Research, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

"The Humanity Test is a great book. John Barton has found a balance between being candid and learned about disability. This book acknowledges the emotional aspects of disability in a sensitive and intelligent manner. Each chapter is an accessible primer on interesting and relevant topics relating to disability, while bringing everything together in a carefully structured argument for social justice. There are many different ways of thinking about disability, Barton manages to acknowledge this while finding universalities for all disabled people. "
--Josh Hepple, disability equality activist and consultant

"Barton shows how disability exposes us to ourselves in all our vulnerability, loneliness, incompetence and fear of disappearing. His research demonstrates how this can paradoxically lead to a deeper, more soulful humanity, so lacking in our contemporary world. The Humanity Test should be part of all therapeutic training."
--Professor Emmy van Deurzen, existential psychotherapist and writer, Principal of the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling and Director of the Existential Academy

SOME PREVIOUS ARTICLES
• "You can be right, or you can be open", Therapy Today (February 2022)
•  Therapy for every body, Therapy Today (November 2020)
•   Doing IPA Research (book chapter). In Enjoying Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy (October 2020)
•   Progressive (dis)ability  (doctoral dissertation) (November 2019)
•   The Illness is the Cure (book review), Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis (July 2018)
•    My Last Round, Golf Digest (May 2018)
•    Love: An expert guide, Psychologies (October 2017)
•    When Someone Told Me, 'Well Done for Not Giving Up’, The Mighty (March 2016)
•    Donald Trump interview: I'm huge!. Golf Digest (October 2014)

For any writing enquiries or proposals, please get in touch by phone: 0203-092-0184, or email:  [email protected]

Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/drjohnbarton

Psychofascism

Definition: When a well person blames an ill person for their illness through the use of psychological interpretations, meanings and explanations

When a well person deliberately or inadvertently blames an ill person for their illness through the use of psychogical interpretations, meanings and explanations of illness.
The Smiths song "Still ill" asks: "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?" (Concludes Morrissey: "I dunno").
The medical model goes all out for the former; the pendulum in western healthcare has swung too far in this direction. But more latterly the pendulum has in some quarters swung too far the other way, to a kind of cultish New Age quackery that can sometimes become dogmatic and extreme. The psychofascists' rallying cry is that it's all in the mind. They regard physical symptoms only as being indicative of something unresolved in the unconscious, a problem in the psyche, a sickness of a suffering soul.
For these self-appointed psychics, mystics, past life regressionists and other supposed healers, individual power and responsibility are inviolable; they see health and illness as a psychological choice.
Even sensible, well-trained and experienced therapists are not immune from psychofascism. They can sometimes be a bit quick to offer clients simple moralistic and shaming psychological explanations for their physical travails—one client was informed by a former therapist that her throat cancer was borne of never being able to stand up and speak her truth to her mother.
Writes Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor: "Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill... Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning – that meaning invariably being a moralistic one" (1977, pp.58–59).
The high priestess of psychofascism is the late Louise Hay, whose book You Can Heal Your Life has inexplicably sold more than 50 million copies. "I believe we create every so-called illness in our body," she writes (1984, p.1). If you only have joyous, loving thoughts, you will stay healthy, she says. If you already are ill, fear not: you can heal yourself. Hay claims to have had cervical cancer in the 1970s – the diagnosis has never been corroborated—and to have cured it exclusively with her thoughts.
In her book, Hay for example claims that diabetes comes from "Longing for what might have been. A great need to control. Deep sorrow. No sweetness left."
Accidents, she says, "are no accident. Like everything else in our lives, we create them."
She says the "probable cause" of Parkinson’s, based on absolutely nothing at all, is "Fear and an intense desire to control everything and everyone." She suggests a "new thought pattern," presumably as a cure: "I relax, knowing that I am safe. Life is for me, and I trust the process of life."
In an interview with The New York Times, Hay was asked if she really believes that people are responsible for their own deaths (Oppenheimer, 2008). Did victims of genocide, for example, or people killed in the Holocaust, get what they deserved?
"Yes, I think there’s a lot of karmic stuff that goes on, past lives... it can work that way," Hay said. "But that’s just my opinion."
Perhaps the leading contemporary purveyor of psychofascist thought is Gabor Maté, the Hungarian-Canadian doctor, writer and public speaker. He declares on his website: "It’s my belief that diseases like cancer, ALS, multiple sclerosis and so on, that cause so much suffering for people, all come along to teach something – and that if the lesson is learned, with compassion for oneself, then the ‘teacher’ has done its job and can then take a hike. That’s not a guarantee, but I’ve seen many examples of people who have taken on their illnesses in this way and either survived or far outlived what medical science would have predicted, or at least greatly improved their own quality of life while alive."
So show me some of those people who got Parkinson’s, learned their lesson and then got better. It has literally never happened.
Cancer is the disease whose victims are most commonly subjected to this kind of judgement. They are told they brought it on themselves by being too emotionally repressed - they have a "cancer personality" apparently. It is then demanded that they think positively and be "strong" to "fight" the disease. Barbara Ehrenreich eloquently describes her experience of this kind of oppression in Smile or Die (2010). Ten million people around the world died from cancer in 2020. Did they all fail to learn the "lesson" that had been offered? How many died believing their expiration was caused by their own personal weakness?
We don’t actually know precisely the reasons for the arrival and progression of cancer or any other disease. Cancer is common in all mammals, too, with a few exceptions: mole rats, for instance, almost never get it (Pennisi, 2013). Are we to assume they are better at expressing their anger than their fellow rodents? Did they have better a attachment experiences in their youth?
Sometimes we are thrown into disease and there is no reason. With life comes disease, disability and death. No one is to blame.
None of this is to deny the importance of psychological processes in health. A decade ago, doctors and researchers who even suggested that there might be a psychological aspect of chronic fatigue syndrome, otherwise known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, received death threats and hate mail; some were physically attacked.
So now doctors have an almost complete aversion to exploring anything psychological at all (beyond the usual cursory "How’s your mood?" question).
Instead of the thesis of the medical model that ignores the mind, or the antithesis—psychofascism—what is needed is synthesis.
Instead of just dispensing pills, a truly holistic, multidisciplinary health service could be help patients come to terms with a chronic illness and use it as a springboard for a whole new life—perhaps a life of healthy living, growth, community, creativity, spirituality.
We are not just our minds, nor are we just our bodies. We are both. The two things are indivisible.

“You can be right, or you can be open"

The February 2022 issue of Therapy Today sees the launch of a new column from the magazine's recently-assembled Editorial Advisory Board. In her introduction to the issue, editor Sally Brown writes: "I'd like to thank John Barton for agreeing to go first with a thought-provoking piece on 'getting over ourselves'."
It's a column about difference and diversity--click here for a pdf.
© This article was first published in Therapy Today, the journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)

The drugs don't work

Hard to swallow: 1 in 6 Brits have an antidepressant prescription, yet the evidence is clear: the drugs don’t work. Side effects and withdrawal symptoms make things worse.
This assessment from BMJ states: "A range of adverse effects are also recognised, often greater in naturalistic studies of long-term antidepressants users than those measured in short-term efficacy studies, including emotional numbing, sexual difficulties, fatigue and weight gain. There is increasing recognition that withdrawal symptoms from antidepressants are common and that these symptoms can be severe and long-lasting in some patients."
This is but the latest voice to join the growing chorus of dissent around pharmacological interventions in psychological distress (check out James Davies' excellent book "Sedated," published last year, to understand the economic forces that created psychiatry's chemical dependence).
You are not a machine. You are a human soul. Talk to someone.

Research and psychotherapy

I contributed a chapter to the excellent textbook Enjoying research in counselling and psychotherapy.
A review of the book by Emmanuelle Smith in the September issue of Therapy Today said: "Interspersed among passages about research are snippets of the contributors' work and insights into their areas of interest, which I found inspirational. Barton's chapter on 'interpretative phenomenological analysis' and Etherington's on 'becoming a narrative enquirer" are among those that incorporate compelling personal storytelling alongside a glimpse into these authors' motivations and processes."
Click here for more details. You can also purchase my chapter here for 25.95 euros.

C R A S H

In 1949, in thick fog, Ben Hogan had a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus. On Tuesday morning last week, in broad daylight, Tiger Woods collided with himself.
Read more

Ending disability apartheid

Since time immemorial, people who are ‘different’ have been excluded, shamed, pitied, patronised,
punished, attacked and killed. In supposedly
fair-minded and tolerant Britain, disabled
people have been deliberately targeted in a
decade of austerity that dismantled public
services, decimated local council budgets and
destroyed any meaningful sense of welfare.
The basic provisions many needed to live were withdrawn while at the same time, disabled people have been scapegoated as benefit cheats and scroungers in media, government and cultural discourse. A 2017 United Nations report concluded that the UK Government has ‘totally neglected’ disabled people, precipitating a "human catastrophe."

My article "A Therapy for Every Body" in the December 2020 edition of Therapy Today is here . Or you can download it as a pdf, below.
© This article was published in the December 2020 issue of Therapy Today, the journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

28-31_dec_tt__counselling_changes_lives_disabled_lives_matter.pdf
File Size:	255 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

Trump: Positive thinking, spin and lies

As I set up my voice recorder on Donald Trump’s desk, my hand was shaking. “Sorry about my hand,” I told him. “I have Parkinson’s.”

“Oh that’s great,” said the future U.S. president. “That gets better as you get older, right? Some of my friends have it—they do great with it.”

Of all the many varied and sometimes baffling reactions from people to news of my neurological ill-health, Trump’s was the most remarkable. Parkinson’s is degenerative? Fake news.

It was July 2014 and I was in Trump’s gilded office, high above New York’s Fifth Avenue, to interview him for the American magazine Golf Digest. I spent 90 relentless minutes in Trump’s PR wind tunnel, blasted by bluster, amplification and foghorn declarations of greatness. Read more

U.S. election: The search for Big Daddy

Trump v Biden

In a fractious, divisive America, on the eve of a presidential election, there is at least one thing the Democratic and Republican Parties can actually agree on: the United States should be governed by a really old, white man.

Donald Trump, 74, was the oldest ever president to take office when he won the election four years ago. The Democrats had an opportunity to nominate someone “young, scrappy and hungry,” a new JFK to inspire a nation, build bridges instead of walls, and give Trump a simple message: “You’re fired.” Instead they picked someone even older. Joe Biden turns 78 next month.

Why must the president be a geriatric patriarch—in a youthful, optimistic, idealistic land of exuberant energy, innovation, creativity, diversity, opportunity, a land where a rallying cry of a generation was once “never trust anyone over 30”?

Because of "father hunger." Read more

Freud was felled by last pandemic

Among the tens of millions of deaths resulting from the last great flu pandemic 100 years ago—the so-called Spanish flu—was Sophie Halberstadt, the fifth of Sigmund Freud’s six children. She died on January 25, 1920.

There was no comfort in religion for Freud—famously atheistic, he regarded a belief in god as an infantile need for a father figure. Writing of Sophie’s passing to psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, Freud said: “as a confirmed unbeliever I have no one to accuse and realize that there is no place where I could lodge a complaint.” Read more

Love in the time of Corona

One world

At night, the silence from the deserted streets and boarded-up bars in my neighbourhood in London feels ominous and dangerous. Out there in the darkness, unseen, the Corona virus continues its hideous invasion. It is efficient and unwavering in executing its sole purpose: to infect, to replicate, to spread, to grow.

The only thing more viral than the virus itself is the fear that it evokes. Fear can divide and diminish us. But when we fight and conquer it together, fear can enlarge us. The age of Corona: the best of times, the worst of times. Read more

What is your body telling you?
My review of the book "The Illness is the Cure" in the Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis (July 2018)

The love expert

My interview with love expert Helen Fisher in the October 2017 issue of Psychologies magazine

Borderline
A moving account of borderline personality set to music by my brilliant friend Martyn. Film by World of Therapy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pLm39M9jtYw

The good in goodbyes
How are you with farewells? Do you avoid them? Leave the door ajar? Just walk away without explanation because if you actually said goodbye, the loss would be too real, and it might just hurt too much?

via GIPHY

Or the opposite: you actually care so little about the other person that you are quite happy just to flick the switch to “off”?
Saying goodbye to someone that matters to you is saying goodbye to the person you were when you were with them—to all the fun, shared plans and dreams you had dared to believe in. It’s all gone now, and forever, and it is unutterably sad.
Yet sometimes, saying bye can be a transformative experience. You say goodbye not just to a friend or partner, but to a worn-out version of you. Your familiar, comfortable cocoon falls away and you emerge, reborn as some kind of a butterfly. Read more

Midlife crisis? Congratulations!
Excuse me, are you lost?
You've been shaken by life you say? Your roadmap doesn’t seem to work anymore?
Congratulations. You are having a “midlife crisis.” They can be big or small, can happen at any age, once in a lifetime or many times (or, for the unfortunate, never at all).
With the help of therapy, you can transform all the breakdowns into breakthroughs and experience some kind of metanoia; a renaissance. You start to play your own game—and play it with confidence and purpose and verve. You start to love life. Read more

Happiest days of your life?
There was a time when young children were allowed to be children.
Primary school was about learning how to play, have fun and make friends. Happy children are more likely to learn and make the world a better place than unhappy ones.
Childhood hasn’t been cancelled exactly, but it is under extreme attack.
This week saw the launch of a campaign for universal access to school-based counselling services. Today's subjects: stress, self-harm, suicide.
Read more

The Big Match: Body v Mind
WHo do you support?
Team Body—or Team Mind?
The former adopts the “medical model” approach to psychological distress: the root causes are largely found within the biology of the unwitting individual and the best treatment is medication. The Mind team, by contrast, regards symptoms as manifestations of underlying, unresolved inner conflict which needs to be explored, processed and resolved through talking therapy.
Of course, for all illness, medications have a vital role to play. Many of us are incredibly grateful for a daily dose of pills that allow us to function better. But for mental health care, increasingly the old paradigm is crumbling, to be replaced by a new, postmodern outlook, one that offers a broad array of different therapies to match the broad array of human struggles; that honours qualitative research as well as quantitative; and that listens to the person in distress rather than talks at them. Read more

Rewired:
The need to unplug
Has the dawn of the internet age been good for our mental health? Or really bad?
There is great optimism: the digital revolution heralds a utopian, democratic, postmodern world where we are all connected, resourced, empowered, heard, transparent, authentic and free to be who we are.
There is great pessimism: we’re entering a dystopian, virtual world where a person is reduced to an online profile to be swiped left or right, texts replace conversation, virtual friends replace real ones, “likes” replace activism, emoticons replace emotions (except for anxiety—lots more anxiety).
To stay alive, and truly connected, we sometimes have to unplug.
Traditional therapy, as old as the hills, remains untouched by technology, and untouchable. Two people sit in a quiet, spare room. One is there to serve the other. If all goes well the encounter facilitates acceptance, change and growth. For the better. It is not a cure, for there is no cure for life. But it helps.
Read more

Perfect love
14/2/16
It's Valentine's Day, in case you hadn't noticed. What kinds of love are in your life? Are you satisfied? Many clients come for counselling with one complaint or another about love. Last year I worked with a client called Jim (not his real name). Jim worried that he was incapable of lasting love. “I just can’t trust it or commit to one person,” he said. “I am a commitment-phobe.” A few months earlier he had ended a four-year relationship. It was fine, he said, but he knew in his heart she was not “the one.” Instead of feeling free, however, he was miserable. “It’s as if I fired the gun,” he said, “but it backfired and blew up in my face.” Read more

Weather report:
notes on happiness
The Office of National Statistics recently released its statistics on the state of the nation’s emotional weather: happiness, anxiety, life satisfaction and how worthwhile life seems. Forecast: Unexpected outbreaks of sunny spells in remote Scottish islands. Fair becoming good in Cornwall. Unending downpours in Liverpool and London. If you’re an older married Hindu woman with a job, living in the Outer Hebrides, you are probably very happy. If you’re a divorced unemployed middle-aged atheist man living in Liverpool, you’re probably not. Is all this meaningless—just an example of “lies, damn lies, statistics”—and, worse still, happiness statistics? Or is this an opportunity to take stock and maybe make some changes? How happy are you—how “worthwhile” is your life? If your new year’s resolutions didn’t work out, should you come up with new ones today, the first day of the Chinese New Year? Read more

Top-10
self-help books
Some self-help books offer wisdom or practical advice, others have the potential to change a life. Some might simply raise a smile. Some are truly terrible, especially the ones that promise instant riches, health and happiness by asking the cosmos for these things, or communing angels, or thinking positively. Here I've selected an eclectic top-10. Of course, reading is a solitary activity, which is fine. But if you want to feel really whole, you won't find all the answers in a book. Read more

An interpretation of Freud
Long considered a sexist dinosaur with a cocaine habit and some bizarre ideas—does anyone believe that little boys literally fear castration, want to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers?—Sigmund Freud is enjoying something of a renaissance. The therapy he invented, psychoanalysis, is at last gaining some much-needed empirical support, while at the same time the default treatment on offer in the U.K., quick fix, symptom-focussed CBT, is increasingly looking like some sort of snake oil. CBT appeals to our common sense. But common sense isn't as common as we'd like to believe. Freud’s revelation was that we are not necessarily always logical, rational beings making optimal choices as we navigate through life’s vagaries, that we are in fact to a large extent strangers to ourselves. The power of the unconscious is his greatest legacy. Darwin told us about ourselves as members of the animal kingdom. Marx told us about ourselves as members of society. Freud told us about ourselves as individuals. Read more

In praise of uncertainty
In 1817, the poet John Keats wrote about how people of achievement had a quality he called “negative capability”: They’re capable “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Negative capability is an acknowledgement of complexity, a mature respect of life’s shades of grey, an understanding that despite what the strident headline, indignant tweet or demanding placard says, the situation is probably not quite so simple. It is the opposite of fanatacism, prejudice, dogma, “isms” and “ologies.” The western world, however, is extremely doubtful about the merits of doubt. We like to think in black and white, left and right, good guys and bad guys, mars and venus, heaven and hell. We demand yes or no in a world of maybe. And in the process, we become blind to possibility. We’re so fixated on some notion of how things are “supposed” to be that we totally miss the beautiful gifts, opportunities and invitations of how things are. Read more

The man who lived life to the full
3/9/15
Oliver Sacks, 82, died on Sunday. The New York-based British neurologist spent a lifetime working with complex cases, along the outer margins of human experience, at the intersection of brain, mind and the mysterious electricity that runs through our lives and connects us all. An atheist by disposition, Sacks had many encounters through his work with something larger, with the numinous. He was perhaps a kindred spirit to Albert Einstein, who described himself as both an atheist and a devoutly religious man. Sacks' life is a reminder that before it’s all too late, we could all use some awakening. Read more

5 tips for happiness
5/8/15
Are you going away in August? Anywhere nice? To a happy place? Do holidays make you happy? Does summer? No? Is there a cure for the summertime blues? So what does make you happy? The size of your bank balance, your physical beauty, your number of Facebook friends? True happiness runs deeper. It arises perhaps from good relationships. Having a sense of purpose and meaning. Becoming who you are, who you were meant to be—fulfilling some of your true potential. Some kind of spiritual practice and belief. A feeling of connection—with yourself, with others, and with something larger. Love. In the end, maybe it's all about love. Whatever happiness is for you, here are 5 tips to pump it up. Read more

The worst self-help book ever
25/7/15
It’s summertime, that supposedly easy-living season when you might be able to slow down and possibly even read an actual book. If so, avoid at all costs the pernicious bestseller You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay, which inexplicably has sold over 50 million copies. “I believe we create every so-called illness in our body,” declares Hay, 88, a former fashion model who claims to have cured herself of cervical cancer in the 1970s. She says the cause of any illness—or even any accident or injury—is all in the mind. Blaming the victim is an insult to anyone who has ever lived or died with disease or disability. She rejects every basic principle of biology and medical science. Such irresponsible quackery should come with a health warning. Read more

What can we learn from Donald Trump?
18/6/15
So a buffoonish ultra-conservative known mostly for his hair has decided that he wants to run the country. Boris Johnson? No, not yet, though that day will undoubtedly come. It’s the other one, the billionaire property tycoon Donald Trump, who on Tuesday declared that he’s going to run for President. In many ways, Trump is the exact opposite of a typical client. So can we learn anything from Trump? Might looking at someone on the far, opposite, extreme end of a spectrum from where we are perhaps move us towards some kind of healthier position in the middle; some kind of balance? Sometimes lessons come from unexpected quarters (the Dalai Lama said our enemies are our best teachers). Read more

On sex and sexuality:
Are you “normal"?
24/3/15
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. This famous dictum, variously attributed to Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello and Thelonius Monk, to name a few, could also be applied to museum exhibits about sex: They are destined to dissatisfy, to miss the point, to prove hopelessly inadequate compared to the experience of the thing itself. Nevertheless, undeterred, notebook in hand, world of therapy went to investigate the Wellcome Collection’s Institute of Sexology exhibition, where you are invited to “undress your mind.” You may, if you wish, do the same. Where do you stand, for example, on BDSM, kink, 50 shades? What are your "rules" of sex? Are you “normal”? Read more

Trauma: the aftershocks of human inhumanity
4/3/15
A sad story last week about the suicide of a British soldier who suffered terrible injuries from a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan. For Private Bradley Paul, the psychological wounds became impossible to live with. The government sends people like Paul off to the dark places of the earth, often for highly questionable purposes. They witness death, destruction, massacres, unspeakable acts of barbarism. They suffer great injuries. They see friends killed right in front of them. They kill. Then they’re supposed to come home, keep calm and carry on as normal. “As you were, soldier.” Thanks a lot for your years of service, your courage, your sacrifices—now go away.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) doesn’t just happen in war zones, far away. It is an unbearable, horrific fact of life. It is among us. How many deeply traumatised people are walking on the earth today, right now, in pain, having received no treatment at all? Read more

The “tortured genius" theory of creativity
22/2/15
The most famous, most iconic tortured artist—the original—is Vincent van Gogh. Today, he would probably be diagnosed as bipolar, or possibly schizophrenic. He had psychotic episodes, he was sectioned, and he allegedly cut off part of his ear. He spent his final year in an asylum. He committed suicide. His paintings seem to telegraph his inner turmoil. The stars on the canvas burn too brightly. Each brushstroke appears laden with madness.
Does a true artist have to suffer, drowning in angst and absinthe in a lonely garret? Must there be some psychological crossed wiring, some gaping brain lesions, or a too-hot neurotransmission system to allow such acute sensitivities to the outer world and the inner world of the imagination? No, not at all. Creativity is not some kind of special neurosis. It is instead like love, or a form of play—a good, healthy and universal part of being human. Anyone can access that incandescent, transcendant energy that can fuel our every waking moment—and lots of our sleeping moments, too. You don’t need to be a genius—nor class A drugs—to see with kaleidoscope eyes and create. Read more

Suffer little children
17/2/15
We’re in the middle of the U.K.’s first-ever Children’s Mental Health Week, launched by the charity Place2Be, which for 20 years has provided counselling in schools (the 30 percent of parents who are “embarrassed” by the idea of child counselling need to get over themselves). The Government, too, claims to be committed to improving mental health provision and services for children, but what governments say and do can be exact opposites. Massive cuts in services, coupled with the legacy of continue-flogging-until-morale-improves former education secretary Michael Gove, is creating a generation of highly anxious, unsupported kids. A report released today announces an attempt to paper over the gaping stress fractures by introducing weekly “happiness” lessons. Much too little, much too late. Children need to be allowed to be children—to play, to make a mess, to be spontaneous, to create (grown-ups should try it sometime, too). And above all, starting long before school, what children most need is love. Read more

Valentine's Day: The demand for romance
14/2/15
It’s Valentine’s Day. The day when there is some kind of Big Brother (or Big Sister) command from on high that today you must be romantic, offer cards and pink fluffy things to the person of your dreams, make grand gestures intended to demonstrate the extent of your commitment, and perhaps go out for an evening meal in a red rose-strewn restaurant offering a “special” (ie. monumentally overpriced) menu.
Valentine’s Day can be great of course, a celebration, a renewal. But love, romance and sexual arousal don’t tend to respond to command. Perhaps overall, on the balance sheet of human joy versus human misery, Valentine’s Day is a net contributor to the latter rather than the former. Read more

The 6 relationship types: What colour is yours?
10/1/15
Our early attachment experiences as babies and infants direct all our relationships in later life. The way we learned to relate—hot, warm or cold—is the backdrop to every romantic entanglement and disentanglement, to every Machiavellian workplace manoeuvre, to how we operate as parents. Attachment, too, provides an X-ray vision into relationship patterns, which as a result can be broadly broken down into 6 different types. What colour is your love? Read more

On change: turn and face the strange
23/1/15
We’re born, we grow, we blossom into gorgeous ripeness. But sometimes our growth can be stunted, stuck or skewed. What prospects for change in these circumstances? Jung wrote: “We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses.” This paradoxical idea of change says: We can only become more like the person we want to be by first fully cherishing the person we are. Acceptance arises from two factors that therapy offers: self-knowledge, and, for want of a better word, love. Read more

On motivation—or why resolutions don't stick
1/1/15
We emerge from 2014, unsteady and slightly hung over, blinking at the harsh light of a new year. A clean slate. A fresh start. But those new year resolutions will be forgotten by February. Human motivation is a complex business. We’re not always sure what we want, or why we do what we do. We are all perfectly capable, in a certain light, of being craven, weak, cruel—or even criminal. Perhaps we might resolve in the coming year to be more accepting of all our various imperfect selves—and of those around us, too. Happy new year. Read more

The “good enough" Christmas
8/12/14
That holiday period butt-end of the year known as “Christmas” can be a time of great celebration; a send off for the year gone by and a welcome to the new. But all too often it’s instead a time of abject misery, a welter of disappointment, a year’s worth of sorrowful Sundays rolled into one. Santa Claus isn’t coming to town after all. There are no chestnuts roasting on an open fire. We get the Christmas blues. Here are 6 survival suggestions. Read more

Multiple personalities revisited
29/11/14
“Eve” had three faces. “Sybil” had 16 different personalities, each of which was unknown to the others. Was “multiple personality disorder” for real? Don’t we all have lots of “selves,” lots of disparate strands in the tapestry of our being? Our community of fragmentary selves is like a rather rubbish football team—and sometimes it falls into disarray. Read more

Gun supporters target mental health
25/11/14
Sandy Hook mass murderer Adam Lanza had mental health issues which had largely gone untreated: He had been diagnosed with autism, anxiety, and OCD, and at the time of his death was said to be suffering also from anorexia and depression. Mental ill-health is a poor predictor of violence, but the prejudice persists. In a land where guns are so much part of the culture—and such a big business—more people blame the mental health system than the abundance of firearms. Read more

The great CBT debate
18/11/14
CBT has faced heavy criticism over the years. Now author and psychologist Oliver James is calling on the government to take a more holistic approach that embraces other talking treatments such as psychodynamic therapy. Why? Because, says James, CBT doesn’t work. At its worst, CBT is an absurdly simplistic, quick-fix approach—the idea that a person’s complex distress will be resolved after a few sessions of having their thoughts and actions challenged is laughable, like putting a tiny sticking plaster on a deep, long-standing and festering wound. Read more

On loneliness
13/11/14
Loneliness has always served an evolutionary purpose, ensuring that cavemen sought out other cavemen and created cave babies. Thanks to loneliness—and other unpleasant tendencies like anxiety, which has kept us ever-alert to threats—our species survived and thrived. Thanks to loneliness, our ancestors, stretching back to the dawn of time, got together with each other. Thanks to loneliness, you and I are here, today. Read more

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1. What is a psychopath?
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3. The worst self-help book ever
4. The 6 relationship types: What colour is yours?
5. In praise of uncertainty
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John Barton is a counsellor, psychotherapist, blogger and writer with a private practice in Marylebone, Central London. To contact, click here.

What is a psychopath?
11/11/14
There has been a lot of talk lately about them. Society applauds the non-axe-wielding kind. They are celebrated. They are idolized. They stalk the corridors of power, finance, culture. They are our sporting heroes. The higher you climb in any field, the more of them you will encounter. Poor ones go to jail, as they say, while rich ones go to business school. But on balance, does the word “psychopath” really mean anything? Are any labels useful? Read more

Seeking refuge from Bhutan's “happiness"
4/11/14
Bhutan, the tiny Himalayan kingdom sandwiched between India and China, is often imagined to be some kind of Shangri-La, an idyllic retreat, an ancient land of lost horizons. “The Land of the Thunder Dragon,” is also a deeply superstitious place, the last redoubt of Tantric Buddhism, home of the yeti. Read more

The therapeutic space
3/11/14
You go to see a therapist. What kind of environment are you hoping for? A formal office space? A doctor’s consulting room? Or perhaps a comfy, slightly messy lounge? The therapeutic environment has been subject to some research and attention, summarised in this report from Co. Design. For counseling settings, research suggests that softness, personalization, and order might affect the experience of therapy and the therapist. Read more

Love After Love
28/10/14
The time will come/ when, with elation/ you will greet yourself arriving/
 at your own door, in your own mirror/ and each will smile at the other's welcome  
This is the first verse of the poem "Love After Love" by Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from St. Lucia. The poem could be taken literally: it’s about love after love. Perhaps an all-consuming relationship has come to an end. The adventure is over. The pain is unbearable. Read more

Denmark: counselling for jihadists
24/10/14
A novel approach is being taken by Denmark towards young jihadists returning home after a stint spent fighting for ISIS and other rebel groups in Syria and Iraq. Are they stopped at the airport and refused entry? Are they thrown in jail? Passports confiscated? Are they forced to undergo some sort of deradicalisation brainwashing treatment? No: they are offered counselling. Read more

Oscar Pistorius' long shadow
21/10/14
I remember August 4, 2012. That was the day when Oscar Pistorius made his debut in the 2012 Olympics, in my home town, alongside so-called “normal” athletes. For many people like me with any kind of physical impairment or disability, he was a massively inspiring figure. Despite being born with no fibula bone in either of his legs and having had both amputated below the knee as a baby, here he was, running like the wind, a true Olympian. Read more

Animal crackers
18/10/14
The Guardian published a moving extract of Laurel Braitman's book Animal Madness, featuring a homesick gorilla, a heartbroken otter, a bereaved schnauzer, a tiger with a nervous tic, and Braitman's deeply disturbed rescue dog called Oliver. Read more

Hard-hitting therapy
16/10/14
News from Russia of a bizarre new form of therapy involving lashing clients with a stick. Paying someone to hit you with a stick might gratify masochistic tendencies but any therapeutic benefits seem extremely dubious. At my school there was a geography teacher who liked to punish students by whacking them with his hockey stick, which he called "my willy" (I swear I'm not making this up). Read more

Happy birthday Nietzsche
15/10/14
On this day 170 years ago, the brilliant, contrarian German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born. He is much more famous now, in death, than he ever was in life. It takes a certain radical, fierce Nietzschean courage to live your life your way—to “come out" as you, without apology, in all your glory. Read more

Hip hop happy
12/10/14
What's the soundtrack to your life? Is it a happy one? Given the complex, at times paradoxical nature of happiness, it's perhaps no surprise that sometimes sad songs--the blues, Miles Davis, Radiohead--can induce wild feelings of euphoria. Read more

Welcome
10/10/14
Today is World Mental Health Day, the annual global celebration of mental health education, awareness and advocacy. Good. This seems like an auspicious day to launch my blog. Over the coming weeks and months, I'll be commenting on news stories and mental health issues; exploring some of the people and philosophies from psychology's rich history; offering up some thoughts and ideas which I hope might be helpful to those in distress; and writing just a little bit about being a novice counsellor. Read more