PLG C&P March 3rd meeting

18 uniformed officers were waiting at the gate of the station tonight when I returned from the 1st day of this 3rd meeting of the HPC PLG for C&P. 18 uniformed officers to check the validity of our train tickets. Such a concentration of power for such a silly job is a rather stark example of how out of balance stuff is in the UK today. Perhaps they are protecting the public from leaving the station quickly. 18 uniformed officers (half of them wearing padded flack jackets over already portly tummies) rather choke the little underpass to the street.

Meanwhile in a bland office in a back street near Elephant & Castle 11 non-representatives of the counselling and psychotherapy world met together with about 20 other people in order to say nothing of importance from 10.30am till 3.30pm. They will meet again tomorrow, and I can only hope that they manage to muster the courage to utter a coherent and definitive sentence between them at least once in the meeting.

To be fair, two or three people did make valiant attempts to keep it real, but they were swimming against a tide of platitudes, point scoring and polite snipes.

The 11 non-representatives from the world of counselling and psychotherapy were selected by Diane Waller (an arts psychotherapist) in conversation with Anna van der Gaag (a speech and language therapist) and Michael Guthrie (an administrator). There had been 40 or so applications, some from individuals, some from organisations. A little list of criteria had been written down and Di, Anna and Michael made their longer list with this. Since then, they have been bombarded with emails and letters and visits about the non-representative nature of the 11 they selected. Today, at the opening of the meeting Diane Waller set out to make a statement. She wanted to set the record straight: the 11 non-hpc people round the table should know that they had not been selected to represent their particular group, but were simply there to ... err, to, well, the only specific thing I heard her say was to hold onto Wales as an idea (because not one amongst them was Welsh).

This is just one example of the mad rules that the group are supposed to abide by. How can Sally Aldridge not represent the BACP? She is their paid Director on precisely this question. They have several thousand members. If she has anything sensible to say, it would be from her experience in that job. Surely she should restrict herself to this, not exclude herself. She should inform the rest of the group about the real practical issues at stake in transferring this particular membership onto the HPC register - this is her specialist subject. What about Mick Cooper? He is a professor of counselling (a relatively new breed of professor, the evolution of which would be very interesting to track) from Strathclyde University. He does not represent the University. So he can speak from a different position, and people can hear him in his capacity of intellectual and scholar, or whatever indeed he is. Peter Fonagy? He is there under the auspice of the Skills for Health - he can restrict himself to talking about the National Operating Standards that are his responsibility to coordinate. Each member of the group has a specific position from which they can speak authoritatively, what's the problem? They have been chosen according to those criteria, haven't they? So why does Diane begin today's meeting by describing the rationality of their selection, then forbidding them to be precisely that? She ended her little lecture by strongly emphasising that those 11 non-representatives should Reinforce and Remind people of their non-representativeness, 'that would be helpful' she said.

Mad.

Difficult questions get parked, reparked and parked again. Topics are constantly left for another day. Another day? There are only 4 days left for this group of people to come up with something that is destined to be turned into law. LAW. Do we need any more laws in this country? There are already more laws than Parliament knows what to do with, and a handful of politicians at Saturday's Convention on Modern Liberty were even pledging to repeal dozens at a time. What is the point of turning this mess into a legal document? The field we know as counselling and psychotherapy is so diverse, so rooted in relationships and places, so firmly fixed amongst ordinary people that the wish to legislate it into a neat standardised package should rather be written into next DSM as a sectionable mental illness.

It is so difficult to sit silently watching this process. It feels like being forced to watch a child being drowned, and forbidden even from throwing a rope.

It is extremely difficult to report on anything of substance. Nothing of substance emerged. However, two things are worth passing on. In the moments before the meeting started this morning one of the HPC lay members on the PLG suddenly came over to show us a CHRE document. This was one of the documents that teach doctors not to have sex with their patients. This document was offered to us in answer to the question raised at the last meeting about the source of the data that Fonagy and Jon Coe were trumpeting that 5% of C&P practitioners constitute a real and present danger. Here is a great example of the real trouble that this group has. A group of eminent and intelligent people are unable to think clearly in this process. We were offered this document as the evidence that 5% of therapists and counsellors were dangerous. I thought she meant that the reference to the paper that produced the statistic would be in there. But no. What was there was the fact that some doctors have sex with or marry their patients. This is absolutely barmy. Well meant, but barmy.

The second notable moment came at lunch time: three of us 'public' were eating lunch together when one of the 11 non-representatives came and sat down beside us. She asked us for our advice - what would we say if it were us who had landed at that powerful table? This was a real live thinking human being and it was a massive relief to discover it. So what would we say? Keep it Real. And she did - after lunch she tried and tried and tried again to keep reality in the picture. I'm not talking about anecdotes - she was furnishing the meeting with real information about things that she knows about, that are actually happening out there. What a relief. I'm going to start a collection to raise a statue for her if she carries on like this.