Feet of clay 26/10/2009
 
You must have heard it by now. Contrary to current belief, antidepressants work much faster what previously thought, in fact within hours of taking the drug. This is, according to BBC, what Oxford University researchers found. " Although patients may not notice the effects until months into the therapy, the team say they work subconsciously", writes  BBC Health reporter Michelle Roberts.

I have to say that I found this reference to subconscious work intriguing, given that of all Freudian concepts, the concept of the Unconscious mind is the one that is contested the most, both "scientifically" and philosophically (you can read some comments on the subject here). But this is not the reason I am posting this. What I was more interested in learning was how did they do it exactly, how did the researchers manage to observe the possible "subconscious" effects of a treatment?

I read, for example, lead researcher Psychiatrist Dr Catherine Harmer quoted as saying the following: "We found the antidepressants target the negative thoughts before the patient is aware of any change in feeling subjectively." Does this really mean that the researchers were able to measure changes in the negative thoughts of patients objectively and before the patients themselves knew of any changes?
 
 
There has been a lot of movement recently in relation to the proposed regulation of counseling and psychotherapy under the Health Professions Council.

In other posts of this blog I have made my personal and professional opinion clear. As I have argued, the HPC, in its attempt to create an umbrella of standards applicable (with minor adjustments) to all Health Professions, has created a Procrustean bed that works by eliminating differences and homogenizing approaches in the name of “protection of the public”, “scientific evidence” and “measurable outcomes”. This, I wrote, can only be to the detriment of a discipline like psychoanalysis which as we have seen, and very clearly, does not fit on that Procrustean bed.

The war is far from over, but there were some interesting developments. Instead of re-writing things that have already been written by others much better than I could ever hope to do myself, I choose to reprint below a press release by several Psychotherapy Organisations –including the ones that I belong to, CFAR and College of Psychoanalysts-UK.

Here it goes.
 
George the Cat 16/10/2009
 
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There was a very amusing article on BBC the other day. It was about George the cat, which has been registered as a hypnotherapist with three relevant professional bodies in the UK. According to what BBC wrote, the bodies accepted credentials which were a bit dodgy –to use an understatement– such as a certificate from the "Society of Certified Advanced Mind Therapists".

Of course, such a Society does not exist, but some of the British bodies that represent Neuro-Linguistic Programmers and Hypnotherapists do not seem to run rigorous checks on their prospective registrants. This allowed Chris Jackson, presenter of "Inside Out" in the North East and Cumbria, to register George.