Anxiety is a normal response to stressful situations, whether you’re living through them right now or worried about something in the future like going into hospital, the possibility of redundancy or an exam. The increase in adrenaline associated with stress can help you work towards your goals: the downside is that too much can stop you sleeping, give you a constant sense of fear and make you short tempered. At the extreme end of anxiety are panic attacks, terrifyingly physical events that can restrict your life.

Depression is a feeling of disconnection and misery, tiredness and disinterest that lasts more than a couple of weeks. People with depression think negatively, they’re depressed about being depressed, and this (entirely natural) negativity feeds on itself, making ordinary life intolerable.

Anxiety and depression often go hand in hand and are increasing exponentially. Research shows that although some people may have a natural disposition towards anxiety and depression these are also perfectly normal responses to the ways in which we live. If you’re working a 45 hour week with a couple of hours commuting every day; if you’re unemployed, endlessly told that you’re a scrounger and have no idea how to fill your time; if you’re in a relationship or job that isn’t fulfilling or is bullying; if your life is about to change – a move, a marriage, a new baby, illness; or if you just can’t stand to continue living in a particular way but feel obliged to, then anxiety and depression make sense.

It’s become fashionable to offer 10 handy tips to overcome everything. I’m very content to help you manage your feelings but the huge majority of clients who’ve wanted a quick fix have also found great value in some introspection to discover some foundations for their feelings as well as finding long term, individual answers to their problems.

I’m particularly interested in working with people from the swiftly changing corporate world where values are altering overnight and taking a toll. A number of clients from this background have found 50 minutes a week reflection very helpful.

Men! Let us in on the secret! When you reach 15 does someone give you a book that tells you how to abuse women?

I conduct domestic violence counselling assessments in East and West London amongst very disparate groups. The women I see are from all socioeconomic and educational backgrounds and a great many racial and cultural groups but the story they tell is strikingly similar.

He wanted to know where I was and who I was seeing all the time. It became too difficult to see friends so I stopped going out. He would argue endlessly until I agreed with him. It got worse when I was pregnant and when I had the baby he couldn’t stand me looking after her but when she cried he became outraged and demanded I shut her up. He wrecked our home, terrorised the kids,  endlessly stole from me, arrived home unexpectedly because he thought I was having an affair and, when I managed to get a restraining order he ignored it, sits outside the house for hours on end and tries to break in. Sometimes he breaks in and beats me up again. If he gets arrested he's let out and then comes to get me. If he's put in prison I have to move because he has said he will kill me when he gets out.

Today the Director of Public Prosecutions will announce increased numbers of domestic violence convictions.

This good news demonstrates that prosecutors have been listening to and acting on DPP advice. Women’s organisations have been yelling all this from the rooftops for centuries but when the DPP takes it seriously things creak into action.

The bad news is 45% of women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, that she will endure 33 assaults on average before she reports them, that 54% of rapes are perpetrated by a current or ex-partner and one third of female murder victims are killed by their current or ex-partner. That’s two women a week.

The quality of convictions isn't discussed. 'Conviction' just means that a person is found guilty. A conviction might mean community service or an 8 week sentence. 50% of men convicted of DV are going to continue being violent towards women, very often the woman who gave evidence against them which is why so many women withdraw their evidence. When you hear of a man who kills his children and then himself you can guarantee that DV was part of the dynamic - death is a very real, very possible outcome for women and children in domestic violence situations. An 18 week conviction isn't going to change that.

Rather than consider these figures – and there are many more – a great many people will address violence against women by saying that men also experience domestic violence. They do. Here are the stats: 26% of men experience DV. 10% of that 26% experience more than 4 episode of DV while 90% of the 45% of women experience more than 4 episodes.

Happily, most men do not assault women and are repelled by domestic violence. That’s not something women should be grateful for. We should expect it of all men. 

It will not have escaped your attention that there’s been very little sun this year. At the Summer Solstice we could expect about 18 hours of daylight and whilst it’s more or less a given that it’ll rain on the Solstice, in a normal summer we’d get around 110,000 to 120,000 lux (the International System measurement of light) per day. We’ve been getting around 10,000 lux per day for 3 months now, and that’s if we spend daylight hours outside rather than in offices.

Every living thing is profoundly affected by light and darkness, our circadian rhythms – the rhythms of waking, sleeping, temperature and hormonal balance – are determined by it. It’s so important that building legislation covers it: we have a legal Right to Light. You can discover much more about light and health here.

It’s not surprising that people who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder have begun talking about a recurrence of symptoms. Here’s a list of them.

From time to time I wish I were able to write a prescription giving people permission to do the obvious. We know that if we’re feeling miserable because of the crap weather then we need to get more light so my prescription is to get out into the open air. Being outside in natural light, even if it’s dismal, gives you more lux than staying indoors. Get off the bus one stop early. Get out of the office for lunch. Make the time!

Light boxes are excellent and begin at around £80. Anti depressants are certainly good for SAD. Praying for sun will do no harm. In the meantime, give yourself a break and get out into daylight for at least, at least, an hour a day on a rainy day and when the sun manages to appear make the best of this precious resource.

Petrūska Clarkson has been on my mind all this week. “One of the most significant figures in the history of Gestalt therapy in England," therapist, lecturer, academic author, creatrix of the Systemic Integrative model, Clarkson killed herself in the summer of 2006. You can read more about her incredible list of achievements here. 

 I never met Petruska Clarkson but along with colleagues noted her death and then never spoke about it again. Her death will have had a much greater impact on her personal friends, colleagues, students and of course the many clients with whom she worked over the years but somehow I missed any obituary other than a letter in Therapy Today. A personal and heartfelt forum for people who wanted to remember her is here.

As far as I know there has been no professional debate over what her death, particularly her death by suicide, might mean to psychotherapy. Having spent a day combing the internet either I’m searching in the wrong places or there has been no discussion.

This morning I was very sobered by the realisation that I’d forgotten her name and searched for her under ‘psychotherapy’ on Amazon where she emerged on page 6. Then I searched for the Physis Institute, the training organisation she founded (as well as being a founder member of Metanoia) and came across a good number of therapists who have called their practice Physis with no reference to Clarkson, but was unable to find anything about the Institute.

How can such an important person disappear so completely? Is this a partial clue?

“I insist that there be no funeral, cremation or memorial service of any kind held for me. Instead I wish sincerely that all those who have valued my work just continue to ‘help the people’ in the spirit of Physis as they are”.

Jason Mihalko, a US based therapist, has written about the impact of a client suicide:

"My patient who killed herself told me once that when she died she wanted no obituary, no service, no tomb stone--no marker of any sort that made mention of her life. She wanted there to be "no memory that my sad life ever existed on this planet." 

This is an endlessly complex matter and I hesitate to draw parallels between two people I’ve never met who had very different lives. But there is something profound about erasing oneself not just by suicide but also in the insistence that routine death rituals be put aside. Even people with no friends, family or money get their name mentioned by a priest as part of their paupers’ funeral, they’re not simply loaded into the cremator or fed into the earth. But Petruska Clarkson and the anonymous client  (and any number of other people who kill themselves) insist that just this be done for them.

Perhaps, just as we could not fulfil the needs of people in life who are adamant that this lack of fulfilment be brought to their death rituals, we may need to ignore their needs in death. Jason’s writing about his experience with one particular person has offered a great deal to his readership over a year, probably extending into many more years. I’m very wary about treading on the broken hearts of people who knew Petruska Clarkson or offering them any offence: speaking for myself I’m disturbed that her desire for erasure seems to have been taken all too seriously. In death, she has yet more to offer psychotherapy.

There’s a great deal more to be thought about here, but perhaps it’s good to end this entry with Jason’s wise words, words that echo Clarkson’s final wishes:

                                      “Treat people like they matter. 
                        It's the most important thing you will ever do.”

Take a look at this interesting post about the lunacy and unreality of endless busy-ness

It's focused on the attitudes and behaviours of people who have enough money for leisure but feel somehow obliged not to have any. I see any number of people in this situation, exhausted, anxious, more or less neurotic - in ordinary language running around not achieving very much. Why? Is it something to do with the endless rhetoric on the basic moral goodness of Hard Work? Is it that women are working harder and not insisting on or letting men do housework and childcare? Do we feel shame at not being seen to be endlessly engaged, endlessly achieving?

"Thinking about things" has a long and respectable history. Spending time thinking, on our own and with other people, helps us improve life and bring it some meaning. A great many of us have lost the ability to, as Pascal said, sit still in a room. We really do need to relearn that thinking is absolutely the opposite a waste of time.