Not fast or funny
I think it goes without saying that I’m not a natural sports person. I have never been able to roll out the NLPs or go for achievable goals. Always last to be chosen for hockey I slink away from healthy prescription, weighed down by the inability to gloss over the deep.
I realised today that I don’t know if I’ll ever be fast and funny again. We are in a forever marathon where years of the existentials lie ahead. Recovery from our isolating life-styles and the hard reconciliations that we will have to embark on if we’re ever going to be able to be in the same room again. Picture what your first post-pandemic staff meeting will feel like knowing what we know now about health inequalities.
My bed time read is The Tavistock Century: 2020 Vision. Low on chuckles but there to reassure me of the post-war(s) role of thinking and talking with other people. A bleakly positive proposal that it may be a matter of survival that we don’t try to un-be or un-see the depth of what lies ahead. It is in this spirit that Surviving Work starts 2021, stepping slowly into the post-pandemic mental health landscape.
In my first offering our website The Future of Therapy has been updated to include the full series of surveys about mental health services - Surviving Work in 2017, the IAPT survey in 2019 and the Covid-19 survey in 2020. These are all subject to the biblical journey that is academic publishing but here you will find the punch lines as infographics.
That 41% of workers in the largest public mental health programme, IAPT, have been asked to manipulate performance data such as recovery rates and attendance.
That the number of therapists earning nothing has doubled to 10% since Covid-19.
That only 4% of mental health workers felt able to raise their concerns about work with colleagues.
And that the Uberization of mental health is right here right now.
Told you, not funny.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be exploring data and ideas about the emerging mental health landscape.
If you work in mental health you can submit to the CTUK’s Covid-19 survey looking at the financial landscape for people working in mental health here.
To join the debate about activism and alternatives at the next National Counsellors Day on Saturday 19th June 2021 click here.