I have never found anything that summarises my experience of therapy (as both therapist and patient) quite like Garrick Duckler’s short film, On Being A Patient. His words provide two gifts: they touch the intricacies of the kinds of problems that people bring to therapy, as separate from diagnostic categories or symptoms, and they articulate the nuances of what can be frightening about the intimacy and vulnerability of a therapeutic relationship. It is nine minutes unequivocally well spent for any patient, therapist, or curious other.
Read MoreBeing a therapy patient, especially in a longer-term, more exploratory treatment like psychoanalysis, requires a certain kind of courage. Those who choose this mode of healing (arguably the most expensive, open-ended and uncertain option, in many respects, of those ‘on the market’) submit themselves to a path towards the perimeter of themselves as they have come to be known, by others and by themselves. Eventually, they must heave open the rusty gate at the edge of their familiar, conscious self, step into the overgrown grass and begin their navigation of the unmapped, incoherent, shadowy outskirts of who they are.
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