You’re welcome

I had an unexpected tender moment with my old dad the other day. Hurtling back to the 1990s I had to ask him for some cash to cover me and my son while I took industrial action. Facing three months of living on 40-60% of my income while still working full time, I was unable to explain to him the maths. Like a lot of the conversations between generations if you’re not living it right now you probably don’t understand it and none of what is happening in higher education adds up for him. My working class dad of a higher intellectual order – who did a PhD late in life at Queen Mary with Bruno Bettelheim –still believes in the power of adult education and learning as the key to social mobility. Even when I make him flick through my power point slides on marketization of public service, he still can’t add it up in his mind why we collectively ruined something so precious. A Higher Education.

Resorting to a simple explanation he asked me a familiar question which in an earlier time would trigger chest pains.

“Is this happening to you because you’re too outspoken?”

Heard as a child as its-all-your-fault for being smart and out of context. Heard now in the heat of cyclical industrial conflict as a working class dad asking me whether I can protect myself in a system that holds both hostility and disdain for what I am. A smarty pants.

One of the most difficult and philosophical questions during industrial conflict is how to sustain yourself and the people who stand with you. These disputes are marathons. Rarely a complete resolution, always compromise and littered with micro-betrayals and bigger ones, wading through the mansplaining/posturing and hopeless generalisations that try to force us back into splendid isolation. To seduce us to cross the picket line.

Meanwhile our quietly-kind solidarity in the everyday is overlooked by design because it challenges established views on what real power amounts to. Whether snaffled up by a coronation or a nudge policy unit, the ordinary relational work that we do for each other in times of crisis becomes absorbed and credited to an increasingly illegitimate parallel universe.

This might look like a tangent but I want to tell you a story about what happens when universes collide.

Universe 1: Organizing in Thailand

For those of you who have been reading this blog since it began in 2012 you might remember the story of Somyot Prueksakasemsuk, the Thai democracy activist, now one of the few longstanding opposition leaders intact after half a century of fighting for human rights in Thailand. I worked with Somyot and Li, possibly the smartest activist I have ever known, when they were trade union organisers and me a trade union educator for a global union federation in the hot industrial zones around Bangkok, offering English lessons and friendship at the shrimp stands outside factory gates to the young workers of the largest multinational corporations in the world. A grim fairy tale landscape shaped by the global shift and our small important attempts to survive it.

Somyot was arrested by the military in 2012 and, after an initial release from a military prison after we raised international attention, he was charged and found guilty of treason under Thailand’s infamous Lese Majeste law. Despite a sustained international campaign involving regional and international human rights networks, Amnesty, INGOs and trade unions, he was denied bail 15 times and went on to serve 7 years in prison, working as the prison librarian and organising the many migrants and muslims in Thailand’s penal system. An educator activist of the old internationalist school Somyot now organizes health workers in Thailand with South Korean comrades doing the same there. They use translated materials from Surviving Work in Healthcare which you can access for free here.

Universe 2: The politics of psychotherapy

Li texted me when Somyot was arrested to ask if I could mobilise a campaign to get him out on the basis if you can raise a disappeared person’s profile you raise their chances of staying alive. At the time I was coming to the end of my training as a psychotherapist at a venerable psychotherapeutic institution. I was due to submit my dissertation based on working in a psychiatric intensive care unit in a few weeks and I requested an extension which was denied. Apparently they did not recognise this as a legitimate request as it was a political issue and deemed completely unconnected to psychotherapeutic work. I subsequently left the institution, having submitted a half arsed thesis about envy and the spoiling nature of institutions.

This was a different age when training and professional bodies of therapy were not imploding over the politics of mental health, in the early days when ignorance was a routine defence. A long time before the persecutory politics of therapy came to dominate social media and in the process shutting down the core of psychotherapeutic practice, free association. As I write UberTherapy, I almost feel fond of these old political debates as the real threat to real therapy rapidly comes into focus. The future is AI, and since its already right here right now we need to move fast. Requiring engagement with a new platformed arena and some careful tiptoeing around corporate legal action. A call goes out from our inspirational US colleagues in the Psychotherapy Action Network to warn us of the deeply political nature of therapy.

Universe 3: The UK Psychiatric System

Last month Li texted me to say she was coming over from Thailand to try to get her brother Zu out of a psychiatric unit in the UK and a section 2 (then 3) order. Home to his family to receive actual care. I tried to breath and meditate on how to help Li run the marathon she was about to embark on.

Each night into the late we talked, long texts just trying to download and digest the mechanics of the UK’s psychiatric system. Zu still florid and hallucinating but within a reality that still made sense. Concerned and paranoid about surveillance, unable to understand his incarceration or hide his rage, institutional reassurances no longer holding any weight in this terrifying maze of paradoxical rules and agendas in a place with no doors on the lavs. A system held together by Bank staff and disconnected moments of care.

We strategize each night about medication and how to understand Zu’s reality. To filter facts, to check dosages and do it all while presenting a veneer of compliance. We whisper sadly about maintaining stereotypical appearances of gentle Thai folk, no dissent here, move along now. I hear in Li’s voice the patient breathing of a warrior embarking on a long battle.

We laughed hysterically at the necessity of combining our experiences of political and psychological battle. Of negotiations with MNCs on hot Bangkok nights. Of evading and navigating military rule. Of staying alive. It is the connection between these parallel universes that was required to hold the chaos of Zu’s internal and external realities, psychedelically aligned through drugs and intense explosive irony. As we turned the corner into exhaustion from holding Zu’s fear for two weeks suddenly and unexpectedly the white male middle-class psychiatrist innocently asks if there are psychiatrists in Thailand and then confirms that Zu can return home in a few weeks.  If he voluntarily keeps taking the pills.

Unwritten universe 4: The marathon of direct action

As our institutions lose moral ground to an increasingly organised disestablished, most of the people I meet these days I would describe as involved in direct action. Far from the safe lands of cybercampaigning and online petitions millions of us are taking political action every day in response to a deepening crisis. For some of us this comes at a small cost of lost Sunday evenings and awkward family dinners but increasingly the financial and employability hit of strike action bleeds into once protected sectors and on infinitely into the future of work. We will not go back to a comfortable parallel professional universe again.

Then add the spectre of surveillance capitalism which is right here in our offices and hospital wards and the systems that allow political control means that only our quiet conversations and encrypted messaging and locally organised responses remain.  As messy and confusing as it might seem as we look from one universe to another, it’s what we’ve got.  

Talking quietly late into the night with Li has reminded me that we can only ever work small in a crisis. That every day we need to say thank you to every person putting themselves forward. To thank our beloved families and friends who carry the heavy load of the costs of our action.

To thank ourselves, out loud and in capitals to alert these parallel universes to our work when it is not seen (or paid).

You’re welcome.

If you’re a #counsellor or #psychotherapist working in the UK please complete the survey & circulate within your networks to get a picture of the cost of living crisis as the basis for an informed debate about the future of therapy. Click here.

Click here to register for National Counsellors Day 2023 when initial survey results will be presented.