Anxious, depressed? Nice.

Therapy Today article, toilet. Oh December 2007, oh well current enough. Psycho Therps in the NHS, £170 mil Gov-mum money for CBT, free at Gov point of delivery. Nice that NICE is thinking of us with its guidelines on anxiety and depression, though it seems to have had the unintended consequence of inducing anxiety and depression in the therapeutic profession. Lets recap. Anxiety is when one can’t, however much one tries, resolve some important life problem. Depression is when one gives up on being anxious. We may be born with a particular set of mental facilities but anxiety and depression aren’t two of them. They are the effect of later circumstances and our ability to cope with them. Anxiety arises, and I don’t think this is as simplistic as it sounds, from dishonesty. Whether it’s one’s own dishonesty of not finding and speaking one’s truth or someone else doing the same, in amongst those lies is the seed of the irresolvable. And the biggest lie we perpetrate is saying, “I am listening” when we’re not. Now for Gov-mum to shell out £170 mil must mean we’re dropping like flies. We can’t cope with this level of inter-social lying. Whether it’s advertising, the media, miss-selling, PC speak, malevolent expertise or overt self-centred control from parent right up to government many of us find ourselves battered in an uncontrollable sea of misrepresentation. However well meaning this Gov initiative is it’s tantamount to paying a large amount of money to have the stable door closed after the horse has left and shot itself in desperation. It may come as a surprise but we, like the horse, don’t want to become anxious and depressed in the first place. We want an honest, less controlled society that gives us the freedom to be, to learn to be capable, benevolent and self-aware. Gov-mum’s attempts to protect us from ourselves through threats, fear, control and restriction bring on the anxiety they are now hoping to alleviate with £170 mil of our own money, which probably won’t work because they’ve now made therapist just as anxious as everybody else.