Whitestone Therapy

I have been glued to one story alone this week. That of Professor Jason Arday, until this week the Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to find the comedy in it. Arday became the youngest black professor at Cambridge University ever, at the age of 37, on the crest of a personal story of disadvantage and "overcoming the odds" that saw faculty heads swooning. A story that involved being non-verbal until 11, illiterate until his late teens, autistic, dyslexic, eventually battling through to learn to read, write and speak, obtaining the PhD and eventually being beckoned to the hallowed halls of Cambridge itself. Was there any hardship young Arday did not face, I ask myself? I've seen many clips on X in the last week, including the gushing coverage at the time of his appointment, given those circumstances. It was obviously a cause for institutional celebration. However….it seems Arday has very much…how shall we say it…in...

  Being a therapist is strange work at the best of times, and over the last year I've been thinking about my practice, how I work, and what I believe about therapy. For me, months and years tend to blur into epochs, and each epoch seems to have its own emotional tone. Certain difficulties seem as though they appear in bunches, and that shapes what you come to feel is the emotional heartbeat of each epoch. That in turn seems to shape how I feel about therapy. Whether this is because the world has changed, people accessing therapy have changed, or because this therapist himself has changed, I couldn't say with confidence. Probably ‘all of the above’. In this current epoch, running a smaller practice, I find myself dealing with questions of meaning and belonging much more often than I would have expected a few years ago. This includes topline categories like anxiety and depression, but this would sell it short. I think what I detect is really a kind of 'structural loneliness...