Many Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) clients are insistent that they can only see me after 6pm. Our first phone call contains some negotiation where I encourage them to consider that, since they’re experiencing workplace stress, they might want to make use of the 5 or 6 weeks of counselling to take a small period of legitimate time for themselves away from work.

Most clients welcome that and are able to get an hour or so for therapy during normal working hours to themselves. Some clients are less comfortable about telling their boss that they’re in counselling and so we meet after 6pm.

Then there’s another group of clients who begins work around 7.30am and cannot possibly get off work until 7pm and so can only meet me after 8pm. We have a chat about how realistic that is and what kind of service they imagine they’ll get from someone who’s worked an 11-hour day and then I offer to pass them on to a colleague.

During the banking collapse I spent some time in a drop-in counselling service in the City. The City is full to bursting with people who work long hours for no significant reason. I heard an awful lot of reasons – not excuses – why people feel they have to work ludicrously hard:

• Only tough A types work in this industry. 
  


• I get paid more if I work more.
  


• I get paid for perfectionism.
  


• A 60 (80, 100) hour week is normal for the first 10 years of employment in this sector. 
  

I’ll be blunt: this is macho nonsense. It’s abusive macho nonsense. If that doesn’t bother you too much, then what about: it’s inefficient and unproductive macho nonsense.

What does a therapist know about how business works? That’s a fair question. But Chris Roebuck of Cass Business School also holds this view:

“It is staggering to think that the financial sector is working on the basis of a completely out-dated and inaccurate measure of staff performance that is counterproductive for both staff and the organisations they serve. It should not be down to the number of hours you work, but your quality and efficiency of output.”

From time to time we all need to work long hours to complete a piece of work, but not all the time. Take a look at this article:

“Some people work hard to pay rent, to put food on the table, because they enjoy it, or — in rare cases — because the job really demands it. But what about everyone else, those who earn more than they need and still run themselves ragged, often working to the point of misery?”

It’s called ‘Mindless Accumulation,’ a phenomenon that’s been compared with obesity. Some people, albeit unconsciously, equate having stuff with being a good person. There’s merit in being not just a taxpayer but a Hard Working taxpayer. Working Hard ™ is part of that good old Protestant Work Ethic where sloth is a deadly sin, the devil makes work for idle hands, and “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat,” a Bronze Age philosophy that we have embraced at enormous cost to the Hard Working Tax Payer for some years now. 

If you work endless overtime to run two cars because you and your partner are employed in different places; if you work long hours to pay for incredibly expensive childcare; if you find yourself exhausted at the end of 45 hour week because you have to pay commuter fares; if you work to buy spa days or minibreaks to help you relax; if you come to realise that you believe your BMW, affluent address and Church shoes makes you a better person than someone without those things, then your reasoning might need some attention.

Psychiatry has often been used as a tool of state control. People who have been inconvenient or low status or cost too much to care for have been brutalised for centuries, so last weeks 'kite flying' announcement that people who are unemployed and mentally ill may be forced to attend some kind of therapy or have their benefits stopped has precedent.

Throwing an idea out without a formed policy behind it is called 'kite flying' because the people proposing it want to see how such an idea might fly. Will we rejoice that unemployed people are being further required to perform more hoop jumping or will we boggle at what a ludicrous bit of nonsense this is?

Ethically, it's a non-starter. When we begin compelling adults to have medical procedures we enter the world of ethical committees and High Courts: particularly because psychiatry has been used to abuse people compulsion in it is treated with enormous caution. This is not to say that it doesn't occur but when it's used it's almost always in a situation that is considered life threatening. People who are not sectioned but who are so depressed or anxious that they cannot work are not a threat to themselves or others.

We have evidence of what happens when we put a government agency - ATOS - between a patient and their GP. The suicide rate increases and the financial cost of appeals outweighs any savings made. The emotional cost to patients and their families is often catastrophic. There's no reason to believe this new scheme will be any different.

Therapeutically, counsellors know that a person who has been sent to therapy by a spouse, employer or parent is unlikely to do well. Therapy should never be a punishment or way of controlling someone, it has to be freely chosen. Yes, offenders are often compelled to attend therapy and what happens is that a majority learn the language of contrition rather than positively learning much about their motivations and their effect on victims.

So we know that compelled therapy is ineffective. We can also add that if this dreadful idea was ever to be implemented it would be limited to six or so sessions, which is barely enough for someone who is mildly unhappy let alone someone with a mental health diagnosis. The waiting list - already enormous for NHS and most agency therapy - would make it unmanageable and we can guess that, just as with CBT, many of the people trained for this project would not actually be therapists at all, but technicians on a budget and under pressure.

So what might the purpose of this dreadful scheme be? Would people compelled to have therapy be removed from the official numbers of the unemployed? This is what happens to people who are compelled to join other unemployment schemes so that the numbers of unemployed and particularly long term unemployed fall, on paper. If ministers wanted to help people with mental illness back to work they need to give appropriate funding to existing mental health services and reopen the services that closed because of reduced funding.

But we live in a period of time when it's not quite acceptable to throw stones at the mentally ill, yet we are encouraged to pour scorn on them if they are also unemployed. If the public mood likes the idea of punishing people who are so profoundly unwell that they have resigned themselves to living on around £100 a week then this will no doubt happen. At the very best, it will offer therapy to people who have not been able to access it. At worst it will offer dreadful non-therapy from ill-trained, ill-motivated non-therapists.

This idea slunk off in shame in 2009: there's no good reason why, 5 years later, it shouldn't slink off to die.

Media coverage of the NSPCC’s change of heart around mandatory reporting of child abuse is causing a lot of confusion. The change is a direct response to the tipping point over MP’s abuse of children* which, in itself, has come about as a result of survivors of historic child abuse finally being taken seriously. 

Perhaps the greatest confusion around this complex, painful issue is that the purpose of all the enquiries and questions is not to smear people in power but to support people who suffered child abuse.

Pete Saunders from The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC) has kindly sent me their strong, developed philosophy on the matter which you can read here. And here's a good survey of some of the pitfalls and benefits of Mandatory Reporting – which of course depends on the provision and maintenance of proper resources.

In the meantime, if you have been affected by the endless reporting of historic child abuse there are specialist agencies who can help you and who are now particularly primed to do so.

NAPAC offer confidential support via email, support groups and 24 hour phone lines.

NSPCC offer confidential support via email and 24 hour phone lines.

SURVIVORS UK: helps men who have been sexually violated and raises awareness of their 
needs. 

RESPOND: Respond works with children and adults with learning disabilities who have 
experienced abuse or trauma. 

INNOCENCE IN DANGER: IID has recently arrived in the UK having been long established 
in France and the USA. It campaigns for children to be protected from both pornography 
and sexual abuse.  

SURVIVORS TRUST: The Survivors Trust (TST) is a national umbrella agency for over 150 
specialist rape, sexual violence and childhood sexual abuse support organisations 
throughout the UK and Ireland.  



* Abuse is always about power, not sex. I am in no doubt at all that more than one politician will have been involved in child abuse in the 80's and 90's. And before, and since.