Hi Daniel Having discovered you for the first time on YouTube yesterday I wanted to get in touch from the UK and welcome your honest and insightful observations about the practice of therapy and the training of therapists. I certainly admire your courage, as Voltaire (allegedly) said \'it is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong\'! Your recognition, clearly based on lots of experience, that many therapists are more troubled than their clients/patients certainly rings true from this side of the pond as well. Of course, the institutions that position the practice of psychotherapy within wider society reflect the interests of the people working in those institutions, not necessarily the people who use the services. The myth of diagnosis serves to entrench those interests, confusing the treatment of the human body as an object (rightly the domain of consensual medicine, requiring patient passivity and clinical expertise) with the exploration of human being as embodied possibility (which lies within the domain of philosophy and relies on the mutuality of dialogue). Having trained for many years as an attachment-based psychotherapist, I agree with much of what you say regarding the legacy of traumatic childhood experience. While I would never want to say that all behaviour and subjective experience is comprehensible to the external observer, surely it is fair to say that one should never reach a conclusion about its meaning until a person\'s history and their social context has been fully explored. In that sense, medical-diagnostic approaches can rightly be criticised as prima facie de-humanising. However, in the spirit of constructive dialogue and a shared desire to learn, I would like to explore a little more the tendentious notion of a \'good\' therapist. I too have never yet met a practitioner/clinician who doesn\'t articulate the view that they are acting in a patient\'s best interests. This seems to be universal. The \'mad-doctors\' working in 18th century \'mad-houses\' said the same as they brutalised the inmates of that era. Unfortunately, I think the simple truth is that a person choosing a therapist or reflecting on the value of a pre-existing therapeutic relationship can only rely on what you call instinct (as good a term as any). \'Goodness\' is something that only exists in the eye of the beholder and cannot be objectively determined, in the same way that madness or truth are not objectively determinable. What I find so admirable in the way that you present yourself is that it would provide a prospective client with a wealth of information prior to making contact. A person who has learnt to be suspicious of the yawning gap between what people say they do and what they actually do is therefore provided with some space to become familiar with the way you are/see yourself in the world before throwing themselves into the odd relational intensity that is created by psychotherapy. This makes me curious about why you stopped practising and I\'d be interested to know whether you found it easier to be open about yourself after you\'d stopped? For my part, I. too, stopped working as a therapist for a while because I simply couldn\'t bear to be associated with the absurdity of the mental health movement. Do you ever think about returning to practice? One thought I would like to challenge is the idea that therapy is inherently asymmetric in terms of power, with the patient/client being unusually \'vulnerable\'. In life, we can\'t avoid the need to take control over the people we become involved with (I\'m not referring to psychiatric coercion here, which is a civil liberties issue masquerading as medicine). I\'ve known people with genuinely healthy and supportive backgrounds who became embroiled in dreadfully confusing and manipulative relationships. The difference is not that some people have an ability to manage how a relationship will develop but rather that, when things go wrong, they can return to the care of friends and family, rather than being thrown back into despondent, self-recriminatory isolation. Equally, as I often advise people who are despairing of ever finding a good relationship, you only need to find one person! As with everything else in life, courage, resilience and tolerance for the shortcomings of others count for a lot. I also wonder if there are some cultural differences here. As I understand it, the US system is much more regulated and, with more treatment privately-funded, there is a greater need to create diagnoses in order for therapy to be funded as \'healthcare\'. Such a system is therefore very reliant on \'technical expertise\' or, as I would call it, the manufacture of pseudo-illness. Patients are therefore forced into passivity from inception, necessarily deprived of a language in which to frame their complaints. By way of contrast, in the UK therapy is still an unregulated lay activity (although it nearly fell victim to statutory regulation a few years ago). As many therapists act for third parties (more often the National Health Service or employers, rather than insurers) clients over here often enjoy what might be considered consumer rights and are not always shy of complaining. Equally, many therapists working in the public sector are relatively uneducated and come from working class backgrounds. This means that they can be quite oppressed by employers or more articulate clients. To my mind, patient \'vulnerability\' is not therefore an inevitable function of the therapeutic relationship itself but is instead induced by wider power interests that position psychotherapy within the world. I am sure there are lots of patients who have been entirely able and willing to tell their psychiatrist exactly where to stuff the medication that has been prescribed but judiciously recognise this will only result in further coercion or deprivation of liberty. Equally, the confident and well-educated can often induce shame and inadequacy in the less fortunate, irrespective of the chair in which they are sitting. To me, this leads to two conclusions. Firstly, I wholeheartedly endorse your view that therapists should make their training and views of the world transparent from the outset. There are many, many schools of therapy - plenty of them mutually contradictory - so this seems to be the minimum that is required to allow patients/clients to make informed choices. Personally, I also agree that therapists should be encouraged to go further and explain much more about their history and lifestyle. However, this does seem more a matter of individual preference. While I personally love your open, thought-provoking style, I\'d be willing to bet that it scared the life out of some of the people who came to see you, expecting instead a reserved, neutral \'professional\' - barely a person at all. Secondly, this analysis reinforces your idea that therapy is no panacea. Kinder communities, institutions and codes of personal conduct would be infinitely preferable to expanding the mental health movement. Learning from our children (not necessarily our own biological children) and other adults is more important than diagnosing and drugging those who make us uncomfortable into conformity. This seems to me to be an essentially a political struggle. Sadly, it seems to me that the US, once the proudest defender of individual liberty and a model of the benefits of independent thought, hard work and mutual co-operation, has now embarked upon a journey into pharma-induced torpor (sorry, that does sound a bit like Donald Trump but I guess there must be some reason he is popular over there). I worry about this because where the US leads, the UK usually follows. I was depressed to see that our own Lord Layard, an economist with no real knowledge of working as a therapist, has been doing the rounds in the US expounding the usual argument that \'mental illness\' does profound economic harm. As we know, the truth is the exact opposite. It is the mental health movement that inflicts terrible economic harm and personal tragedy by undermining personal autonomy and mutual co-operation. On a final, more positive note, nearly twenty years ago I was working in S Carolina assisting attorneys working on behalf of death row inmates. At the time, it seemed inconceivable that the US would turn against the obscenity of racist, state-sanctioned killing. Now, the death penalty is in terminal decline and mums in Colorado can legally buy marijuana cakes for the weekend. How times change!!! So keep going, my friend, our time will come! All the best Paul