In January, London’s School of Life held what it called “The Self Help Summit.†The Summit, culmination of years of psychotherapists’ frustration at what they call the Self Help Industry, brought together a remarkable range of (tongue very much in cheek) the usual suspects: Philippa Perry, Alain de Botton, Richard Wiseman, Mark Vernon, Frank Furedi,…
Category: Psychotherapy
World Cup 2018: Remembering My Russian
When I heard the news that the Russian Federation would host the 2018 World Cup despite a near-perfect bid from England, I remembered my Russian. My Russian was one of the very few great men I consider myself to have met. You won’t have heard of him, and I won’t give you his name. Our…
Talk Therapy, Sympathy and Meaning
Metatone raised three questions in comments on my earlier post here : 1. Is the common factor in talk therapies that work the regular contact with a relatively non-judgemental/sympathetic person who seems to be paying attention? 2. Is the common feature of all the talking therapies that they represent a process (thinking of process over…
Seligman & Layard: Positive Psychology in Politics
This post is in response to part of Metatone’s comment on my earlier post here Sport got there first, of course, and got there many decades earlier. Even before Freud and Kraepelin had begun constructing their contrasting disease models of mental illness, athletes and footballers had come to a basic conception of positive psychology. It…
Deisler, Football and Depression
I’d like to thank Rob Marrs for putting me onto this particular story. I don’t follow European football particularly well, and the Deisler situation had completely passed me by. I doubt very much I can do more with it than rehearse the usual things, but here’s what I make of it nonetheless. Depression is “my”…