Two rather opposing forces have perhaps by chance come together in day-to-day mental health practice, making an odd but powerful alliance.
There was a time when psychoanalytic theory was an important current in mainstream psychiatry in the UK. The Royal College of Psychiatrists still has a Faculty of Medical Psychotherapy and psychoanalytically minded junior psychiatrists can still be picked...
OK. So what is ShrinkTank?
A good name, at least, because it’s a kind of think-tank for people in the shrink business, shrink being a fairly affectionate 1970s or so word for psychiatrist. A short-lived venture, almost certainly, because blogs and one-person soap-boxes tend to burgeon briefly but then collapse under the pressure of inertia, distractions and the inevitable disappointment of optimism and good intentions withering like bedding-plants in a late summer drought.
And…….?
Its conscious motivation is to correct insider blindness, an endemic (but not inevitable) affliction of organisations, institutions and professions, by shedding light
on the dense knot of interactions, events and phenomena that it is their function to deal with. As well as making them more visible, its intention is to encourage new ways of looking.
Most important of all, it is non-aligned and with no vested interests – other than wanting things to be better, and believing that they can. This is a kind of self-interest, maybe, the unconscious motivation behind which may well not matter at all. As I have said elsewhere, society needs our ulterior motives as much as we do.
In our short, busy lives what possible value could there be in reading the meandering expression of self-interest, contaminated by the reactionary cynicism of someone who has been in the business too long?
It’s a good question, which may well be fatal to the whole enterprise. To be true to its ethos, ShrinkTank will leave it hanging in the air.
This organisation has not been certified as a producer of reliable health and social care information.
It is a producer of opinion based on experience. Only you can certify it as reliable!
