Abstract
It’s a tough world, even for relatively comfortable professionals. We cannot live off past achievements, short-term contracts are becoming the norm, and the West now struggles with low-waged, yet highly-mechanized, educated and motivated competitors. The effects invade or infiltrate all our lives.
Professors in every branch of the sciences prefer their own theories to truth; the reason is that their theories are private property, but truth is common stock.
(Colton, 1822)1
A neurotic is the man who builds castles in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. And a psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.
(Anon)
The monitoring of mental health services is hampered by a lack of information about service activities and an almost complete absence of information about outcomes.
(Audit Commission, 1994)2
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Notes
Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon. Bliss and White, 1822.
Audit Commission, Finding a Place: Review of Mental Health Services, p. 14. HMSO, 1994.
See, for example, Michael Argyle, Social Skills and Health. Methuen, 1981;
and Ian Kennedy, The Unmasking of Medicine. Granada, 1983.
P. E. Meehl, Discussions of Eysenck’s ‘The Effects of Psychotherapy’, International Journal of Psychiatry, 1965, 1: 156–7;
L. Saxe, The Efficacy and Cost-effectiveness of Psychotherapy, Office of Technology Assessment, Congress of the United States, 1980; C. Sherrard, The rise in demand for counselling, unpublished paper. Leeds University, presented to the British Psychological Society. Lincoln, 1991.
V. Raimy, Training in Clinical Psychology. Prentice Hall, 1950.
R. D. Rosen, Psychobabble. Avon, 1979.
Whether Chinese medicine can be shown to meet Western standards of empirical testing remains to be seen. A great deal of it appears to consist in metaphor more than testable theory. Significantly, it appears to be losing ground in China to Western medicine. For introductory texts, see: Ted Kaptchuk, Chinese Medicine. Rider, 1989;
Manfred Porkert, The Theoretical Foundation of Chinese Medicine. MIT Press, 1978; The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, translated by Ilza Veith. University of California Press, 1972.
F. Capra, Uncommon Wisdom. Flamingo, 1989.
Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea. Puffin, 1971.
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© 1996 Alex Howard
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Howard, A. (1996). Who shall be our counsellor?. In: Challenges to Counselling and Psychotherapy. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13825-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13825-8_4
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