The female voice on the phone sounded very distressed. A wife, who was very worried that her husband, very depressed since having been made redundant six months ago, was getting worse and going to do something "crazy". I tried to calm her down, and asked for some more information.

This happens, from time to time. I get contacted by people who act on behalf of someone else. They are very worried about a relative, friend or significant other, and try to find some help. Sometimes they just ask me if I can prescribe medication, or want specific medical advice. If this is the case, I refer them to the person's GP.

More often, however, the call is a call of concern. Like this distressed wife, they call because they are worried that someone close to them is feeling down, is neglecting themselves, is depressed or just very unhappy.

There was a very interesting article on the New Scientist website, about the question of consciousness. The author, Ray Tallis, argues that we have failed to explain how consciousness equates to neural activity inside the skull because the task is self-contradictory.

Tallis, a Professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, challenges the "orthodoxy", held by most neuroscientists and philosophers of the mind, that very soon scientists will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. He stresses, however, that his argument is not about technical limitations; rather it is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is.

There is an article on Times On Line about state regulation of psychotherapies which I read with great interest but which at the end left me with a mixed feeling of a vague contradiction. The writer, Lucy Banneman, tried to approach the issue carefully, highlighting the arguments of both sides, on the one hand of those who claim that an unregulated world of psychotherapies and other therapies of all kinds are infested by charlatans who only look to manipulate clients and maximise their income, and on the other hand of those who claim that the HPC is too bureaucratic and costly and not really suitable to deal with what psychotherapists do.

I have made my position on the subject clear in various posts of this blog, and if I am returning to Γ­t is not because this article of the Times has something very new to offer to the debate. I am mentioning it because in my opinion it is flawed by something which in my view is a serious journalistic error.

I was following news from UKCP very closely these last weeks. We had elections for chair. These elections were the first in which all registrants were invited to vote, and were particular important in view of all the changes currently happening in the British "psi" world (the world of psychotherapists / psychoanalysts / counsellors). I am referring, of course to the much debated and undesired, in my opinion, but imminent, possibly, statutory regulation of the psychotherapeutic professions by the Health Professions Council. I have argued about this elsewhere in this blog.

The election process took place in October and early November and the results were announced on Monday. New chair is going to be Andrew Samuels who won by a vast majority of 66%. The second candidate, Carmen Joanne Ablack, got 34%. As you can see, with a margin of 2 to 1 Andrew can call his a real victory.

According to Electoral Reform Services, the independent charity commissioned to administer the voting, the turnout was "tremendous", with almost 48% of registrants voting.

It appears that voters felt that something important was at stake, and decided to do their bit.

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.

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.

In my latest post I wrote about how people who see that you are a therapist take it for granted that you deal with mentally ill people. I realize that this association between therapy and mental illness is not rare and goes both ways. If you are in therapy yourself many people seem to automatically believe that you are mentally impaired in some way.

Ask yourself. Imagine that you were in some kind of distress and asked your best friend for some kind of advice. What would you think if they told you that you need to see some a specialist, a psychotherapist perhaps?

Many people would take offence. They would protest that they are not ill, and cut the conversation short. If their best friend was like them, they would back down immediately and would try to suggest something else.

People ask me sometimes what I do for a living, and when I tell them, almost invariably I am met with a look of understanding and compassion. I know what this look says. It says: “Poor you, for having to have such a regular contact with those mentally ill people.”

In the early days I tried to challenge this view. (I don’t anymore).

I would explain that people who go to a psychotherapist or a psychoanalyst are not necessarily mentally ill. I would admit that some of them might be, of course, but even they, I would stress, do not go to the therapist because of their illness. They might think so, but what they really do is go to the therapist because they need help and hopefully the therapist can provide this.

This very simple truth was incomprehensible to many of my interlocutors –and, I would expect, to many of the readers of this blog. I can almost hear, loud, the objections: “If you cannot cure people, why do you invite them to come to you? Is this a joke or something?”