A matter of trust and articulation
Sir — In response to Donal Lynch’s article, (‘The mental health stigma has faded, but quacks are thriving’, Sunday Independent, December 11), I’m glad I didn’t read this when I was desperate to find a therapist who could help me understand why I felt the way I did, and why I couldn’t function normally in life at that time.
Though the article opens appropriately with necessary regulatory professional matters (now governmentally planned for), and the challenges one may encounter when pursuing a therapist, a process that can indeed be arduous, especially when one’s worldview is hopeless (as it is frequently at this phase of engagement).
I don’t agree, however, that the therapist’s attire hardly matters, so long as one can provide the client with some degree of hope and guidance. Later in life, I went on to professionally train and register as a therapist, now for over 20 years. When someone sits in front of me, I instinctively want to offer them that hope and guidance, as we navigate their life story. Though depending on weather and comfort, my intermittent change from shoes to sandals hasn’t yet emerged as an issue of concern (as it did for Mr Lynch’s cited experience of therapy) for people in distress, though perhaps I may be as yet unaware of how my footwear inhibits my effective therapeutic engagement with clients.
On the financial matters noted (though I work within a public service), I have found through collaboration with private psychotherapists, that clients who have mustered up some degree of motivation to begin therapy, have found that investing in themselves (even in widely available low-cost or sliding scale capacities) can be the symbolic catalyst which led them toward real and sustained change. For a client to begin to trust and articulate how they think and feel in therapy, is often a matter of life and death.
When Mr Lynch references a novelist’s interpretation of therapy, ie “to a farmer moaning about the weather”, such publicised commentary concerns me, considering the 500-plus individuals who died by suicide in Ireland, in 2015, and who may not have had the chance to talk about what was evidently concerning them deeply.
If I were to imagine telling one of my clients that “you just have to get on with it”, I would truly have lost faith in the human condition and with the distinct possibility — that no matter what our circumstances, we can have hope, change and improve our lives for the better.
From my clinician’s perspective — therapy can be an accessible, life-saving and transforming resource for people — which is hopefully reassuring to your readers, in contrast to what Mr Lynch’s article indiscriminately suggests.
John Connolly, Skibbereen, Co Cork