Description

If CAMHSville didn’t already exist, it would be the sort of place we’d have to invent.

I started as a student nurse in CAMHSville. At the end of my training I should have left, but nowhere else would have me. So, because she felt sorry for me the Manager at the Big Hospital Trust gave me a job as a Staff Nurse at the adolescent unit and I was content. But like some Truman Show wannabe I began to uncover ugly truths about the quaint place called CAMHSville and the thing they did there called psychotherapy. Undeterred, I convinced myself that some training could turn me into a conformed nurse therapist and thus, catapult me into the dreams of my patients. Instead, I discovered the dank cellar of my own mind.

This is not a ‘how to’ book. It is raw and unscientific performance ethno-blog research and has the following thesis: the past comprises of stories which inform future stories constituting what we are, but it is in the present that we are who we do. The story has multiple meanings sovereign to the reader about a simple story of conception, pregnancy and re-birth in the metaphorical sense. I reflect on themes and incidents which are common for most would be nurse psychotherapists. Stuff like, isolation, rejection, loss, abandonment, lust and all of the other ugly transferences that supposedly get in the way of psychotherapeutic work.

The Counselling Industry is about healthcare organizations and squalid interpersonal action. It’s about recurring patterns and social positioning. It’s about the life story we write for ourselves and how we negotiate the one written for us. Counselling in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) is a discourse. It has multiple conflicting messages and connotations. It is constituted by and constitutes cultural meaning. It is political. It is not neutral. It is not an ‘it’. Counselling is governed and governs. Counselling simulates metaphor with similarities to time, place and space. And from this, there emerges something ontological. Mostly anxiety. So, welcome to the town of CAMHSville. A critical analysis of something known as living your life through interaction with other people. A progression of learning about the overwhelming and arrogant assumptions made by the care business.

Although a standalone book The Counselling Industry is the second episode of a trilogy exploring the significance of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in the UK (both Episode I: Therapy Factories and Episode III: Wendy and the Mysterious Nursing Franchise are available electronically). They offer an insight for anyone participating or intending to clinically experience this specialised arena of health and social care. In addition, the descriptions and research dilemmas give an insight for researchers, psychotherapists, counsellors, therapists, students of cultural studies, mental health and psychology.