“How do I know how if what I think and feel is right? Maybe everyone else is right? I think I know what I think and then someone comes and says something different and I automatically believe them! Why do I do that? Then I forget what I thought in the first place so I must have been wrong!” Sometimes all we need to do is relax, make a space inside and ask ourselves in a friendly way…

What should we be asking about the social, cultural, historical and evolutionary contexts in which compromised mental health arises and how it is compounded? Has humanity lost its way somewhere? Is it heading for its own imminent destruction via anthropogenic climate change, exhaustion of planetary resources and geopolitical conflict? Professor Colin Feltham is taking the dark view seriously. Here, he shares a precis of his new book, “What’s Wrong With us? The Anthropathology Thesis”.

Compassion is not something artificial, like telling yourself you are good at something when you’re not, or that you are a ‘good person’ when you don’t feel as if this is true. Compassion naturally flows once the blocks of shame and self criticism are removed.

Over in our practice development section, I’ve reviewed DEVONthink, a remarkable software package that brings artificial intelligence to the job of managing and using large collections of information. At first I thought it could make a great tool for mental health practitioners doing research and running a small business, but now I realise it can a secret weapon for just about anybody who needs to manage a flood of information.

The lesson that it is facilitative not to press others to disclose, and to communicate that lack of pressure explicitly, is a useful one in all kinds of relationships; mothers persistently asking their children to tell them what happened at school springs to mind, as does the situation in which the stereotypical wife ‘asks the husband to talk about his feelings’.

There is a strong possibility that when a patient goes to the doctor with depression, to be treated within the medical model, they may underplay or not even mention physical symptoms, thinking that “they’re all in the mind” — meaning not real, not worthy of attention. In fact, pain is felt in all kinds of ways, and when doctors and patients alike recognise that, research shows that treatment works better.

Why is it that if a fascinating or difficult client comes along and the counsellor spends an entire supervision session, or most of it, working out how to proceed, this client invariably never comes back? Is this the widely known and surely scientifically proven by now ‘Sod’s Law’? Or is it just me?