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After the big response to our launch event in January, it’s been hard working out how to encourage people to get together and organise campaigning action in support of the uACT manifesto. Actively campaigning for change is always a struggle, there are several existing progressive groups campaigning around many of the issues and the general political environment is pretty antithetical to the possibility of political hope and social change.
It is clear, however, that there is an appetite among therapists and other psy workers to stand up for the value of relational work with therapy clients as well as in wider community settiings, and to oppose the dominance of transactional and medicalised “management” of our society.
This meeting is for people who want to build and support campaigns aimed at challenging forms of psy practice that essentially manage and maintain social and emotional injustices as part of a system which routinely and irresponsibly puts money before people, and does not pay attention to the very real social struggles that affect our clients and their mental health.
So far, suggestions for campaigning have included:
– concerted exposure of the failures of the IAPT service by local groups through:
- workgroups on analysing IAPT phoney results
- publically reporting the reality of IAPT failure through their own stats
- attending NHS regional/local authority scrutiny meetings to present the reality
- campaigning locally to protest the IAPT monopoly
– developing alternative proposals for relational therapy provision in the community, among young people, at schools and colleges and so on
– supporting campaigns to stop SCoPEd; to undo the hegemony of medicalisation, diagnosis, bio-chemical ideologies and short-term behavioural therapy; to challenge phoney definitions of evidence-based modalities of therapy; to put a halt to unpaid jobs in counselling and psychotherapy; to challenge IAPT barriers to NHS work; campaigning for social justice and diversity in our training curricula.
– public events like a People Not Pathology national conference; press releases; a progressive Youtube news channel on “mental health” issues with interviews across a range of activity and experience in the field.
We are hoping represenatives from some of these campaigns will come to the meeting and speak briefly about their work. But the focus will be on people attending who want to get involved in campaigns, who have ideas for organising action and for promoting the availability of counselling and psychotherapy and other forms of relational psychological support across society.
We will organise the meeting to offer participants the maximum opportunity to get together to speak, discuss and make decisions for the future.
We hope to see you on the 15th.
All the best from the uACT organising group
ua2counandt@lauras1990
uACT 