Psychotherapy and critical psychiatry need to cooperate

I've posted verbatim a copy of the talk I gave recently to the Council for Psychoanalysis and Jungian Analysis, a college of the UK Council for Psychotherapy (see powerpoint slides). Part of the aim of the talk was to challenge the rhetoric about Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), particularly from its two main protagonists, David Clark and Richard Layard (as I have done in previous posts, eg. Wider measures of IAPT outcomes needed). Saying that IAPT is a 'marvellous treatment' has to stop. Unrealistic claims about the effectiveness of psychotherapy are a 'perversion of care', to use Rosemary Rizq’s phrase (see previous post).

Critical psychiatry and psychotherapy need to work together to change the dominant technological paradigm in modern mental health services (see previous post). This technological paradigm includes psychological therapy if it is applied in a mechanistic way. As in the position statement from the Division of Clinical Psychology of the British Psychological Society, we need to give up the disease model of mental disorder (see another previous post).