Frank Furedi

A quack’s way to build the recovery
The government plan to offer recession therapy just makes victims of us.

The global economic crisis represents a challenge. Unfortunately, governments often appear to be prisoners of their own insecurity: instead of inspiring or reassuring, they end up exacerbating a climate of fear and uncertainty. So it is with the recession.

The government’s announcement that it will offer psychological support to people concerned about their economic future is a textbook example of how to make a drama out of a crisis. New Labour clearly looks upon people’s existential anxieties – about unemployment, poverty and family fallout – as a potential mental health emergency. It plans to train 3,600 therapists and hundreds of specialist staff and set up psychotherapy centres to deal with what it sees as a growing army of mentally ill people. This institutionalisation of “recession therapy” is based on the assumption that the economic crisis will lead to an epidemic of depression and stress.

The principal effect of all this will be to normalise the idea that people facing hard times can become mentally ill. Consider a recent example: over the past decade, experts and therapists have tended to represent the transition from primary school to secondary school as a traumatic event for children. Instead of discussing children’s arrival at “big school” as an exciting experience, experts now offer transitional counselling for what was, for decades, regarded as a normal and banal aspect of young people’s lives.

Transitional counselling, like many forms of therapy, has a habit of turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once children pick up on the idea that going to secondary school is a traumatic experience, many of them start to interpret their normal anxieties and insecurities through the idiom of psychology. One symptom of this malaise is a rising number of referrals for a recently invented condition: “school phobia”. There is little doubt that policies seeking to “psychologise” people’s response to the economic crisis will have a similar outcome.

The capacity of people, and the community they live in, to deal with a crisis depends on their ability to comprehend and make sense of it. Sadly, 21st-century western societies have fallen into the habit of discussing the global economy in highly individualised and psychological terms. We are told the credit crunch was precipitated by a crisis of “confidence” or caused by individual greed. According to the prevailing fatalistic viewpoint, most of us are “victims”. As in a Hollywood disaster flick, people are assigned the role of powerless, passive individuals, whose state of mind is defined by their sense of vulnerability.

We have come a long way since the early 1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s government launched a programme of counselling for those who were about to lose their jobs. Then, many commentators identified these therapy schemes as a cynical attempt to contain and defuse the reactions of the unemployed: critics accused the government of being more devoted to helping the jobless to “cope” with their predicament than with creating new jobs and pointed out that the unemployed were not interested in their help.

That was then. Today, therapeutic intervention is endorsed by everyone from the powers-that-be to the trade union movement and anti-capitalist protesters. The institutionalisation of counselling is underpinned by an intensely pessimistic view of how people behave during times of adversity. They are assumed to lack resilience and the capacity to cope and therefore need professional support.

In recent times, critics of capitalism have condemned the free market on the basis of its alleged mental health impact. This therapeutic critique of capitalism has been implicitly accepted by policy makers, who assume there is a causal relationship between an economic depression and a crisis of mental health.

The government’s therapeutic intervention redefines a crisis of society as a crisis of personal deficits and powerlessness. Instead of offering clarity and a sense of meaning with which we might approach the crisis, the government provides individuals with dubious therapeutic techniques.

What we need is a totally different approach, one that regards people as problem solvers rather than as potential mental health patients. Experience shows that communities can deal with economic insecurity and hardship if they are provided with a sense of purpose about what should be done. People don’t need counselling but, rather, opportunities for rebuilding their lives. Instead of encouraging the public to look to therapists for help, our political leaders should foster a climate that supports individuals and communities who are committed to helping themselves.

First published by Sunday Times, 15 March 2009

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