Why I am not a ‘health professional’ Anthony Stadlen

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with me, the client did not choose to get herself properly medically investigated. In a number of cases, investigation by the Institute of Neurology, or by another hospital department, showed that my client had a serious physical illness, such as epilepsy or ulcerative colitis. The client then received appropriate treatment from specialists, but invariably chose also to continue psychotherapy with me, to work on her real emotional, interpersonal, moral and existential problems, such as her difficulty in trusting her critical faculties and asserting herself with doctors, rather than the imaginary problems which her doctors had invented for her, to cover their negligence. John Heaton is wide of the mark in accusing me of encouraging ‘the split between body and soul’. I am a qualified Tai Chi instructor as well as a psychotherapist, and both activities engage me, as they do those I try to help, body and soul. However, there is no guarantee that a client’s health will improve through psychotherapy. Apart from anything else, clients’ priorities differ. Some explicitly use psychotherapy to explore how they have been undermining their health. Others decide it is reasonable to risk their health in their search for fulfilment in love, mathematics, music, religion, sport, art, poetry, philosophy, mountaineering, journalism, guerilla warfare, or whatever. A psychotherapist is entitled to raise the question whether the client has taken the risk to health seriously enough, but that is all. It is no business of the psychotherapist to try to persuade the client to make health his or her overarching goal. That psychotherapy may facilitate the client’s health does not make the psychotherapist a ‘health professional’. Psychotherapists have facilitated clients’ achievements in literature, art, music, science, architecture, but that does not make the psychotherapist a literature, art, music, science or architecture ‘professional’. Children who have pets appear to develop better resistance to certain diseases than children who do not. Does this make pet-shop owners ‘health professionals’? ‘Health professional’ may be a reasonable term for certain psychotherapists who specialise in facilitating their clients’ quest for health, if this is an explicit part of the contract. But it is an inaccurate description for psychotherapists in general. It both diminishes and inflates. The concept of ‘wholeness’ is seductive, but misleading in the present context. It blurs the distinction between ethics and health. The argument from ‘wholeness’ is dishonest, because if ‘wholeness’ is a kind of synthesis of ethics and health in which they are ‘as one’, as John Heaton argues of body and soul, this still does not explain why those who guide others towards ‘wholeness’ should be regarded, and regulated, as ‘health professionals’. Why not ‘ethics professionals’? Or indeed, why not any other sort of professional, since all are part of the whole? To classify psychotherapists in general as ‘health professionals’ is, if the above analysis is correct, illogical. But it also has empirical consequences. ‘Health’, in the context of psychotherapy, is usually taken to mean so-called ‘mental health’. To speak of life in terms of ‘mental health’ is a kind of idolatry. It degrades language and life. It legitimises the coercion and forced ‘treatment’ of ‘mental patients’. But, more than this, it seduces and mystifies. The psychotherapists who like to call themselves ‘clinicians’ do not see that they have been corrupted. For all these reasons, as a psychotherapist, I find it offensive and demeaning to be categorised as a ‘health professional’. This term cheapens the work I do. 2
Jenny Janes kindly asks about the ‘nature and aim’ of my work. I shall try to go a small way towards answering by presenting some fragments from accounts of a few of the people who have come to me for psychotherapy over the past thirty-five years. I am deeply grateful to these clients for their lucid descriptions. Client 1 The problems that caused me most trouble, that caused me to be angry, that caused me somatic pain, that stopped me having trusting relationships, that made me doubt my judgement and that caused me to feel helpless were not problems that could be objectively described using the present tense. My problems did not belong in the same category as lack of money, ill health, homelessness and unemployment. Therapy did not help me to cope with problems that continued to exist. I found during therapy that my problems were part of the way that I described my reality. The magic of therapy, and I mean magic, is that as I talked through the problems, as I dared to describe them they dissolved. I followed the shadows to their source only to discover that as I got nearer the source had disappeared. When I turned around the shadow was no more. Client 2 I found gaining an ethical understanding of the situation most helpful. It was a great battle to come out of a world where I would succumb to feeling guilty to one where I could stand on my own two feet and defend what was right and best for me. For this to come from my own spirit, with my own senses, has been a very difficult struggle. It has been a constant process of throwing problems onto a screen and trying to untangle what to me were complex problems. It has been an enormously creative and energising process but one I could never have done without a therapist whose attention was always concerned with the ethical values operating in interpersonal situations. I do believe good psychotherapy raises the voice of conscience, making it harder – but far from impossible – to lie to oneself. The experience constantly forces one to continue addressing problems one would rather avoid, until one regains a sense of spirit and wholeness that is robust in this world. It does ask that one live up to the best of oneself. Providing this framework for discussion of the world has been something for which I am enormously grateful. It is this, which has given me creativity, confidence and independence as well as total fascination with the importance of truth and ethical values in our lives. Client 3 The only experience I can liken this particular therapy to is when I, as a shortsighted child, was first given a pair of glasses to wear – suddenly the world sprang into fine detail, with colours and shapes taking on a new meaning. I can remember then that I spent days just gazing around at myself and at the world around me, in wonder that I had previously missed all that. And that’s really what I’m left with from the experience, and hope will remain with me for a long time yet – the 3
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Why I am not a ‘health professional’ Anthony Stadlen

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