ACFM - #ACFM Trip 18: Therapy

Episode Date: July 25, 2021

Keir Milburn, Nadia Idle and Jeremy Gilbert get on the couch to talk about therapy. Wrangling with how to square their collectivist politics with the introspective work of therapy, they wonder if people on the left are more inclined to seek such treatment, and what role physical exercise plays in their mental wellbeing. Analysing their […]

I love therapy. Okay, good. You should have therapy. He should have therapy. Everybody should have therapy. Okay, good. What did he say? Therapy, therapy, therapy, therapy.

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM. home of the weird left. My name's Keir Milburn, and I'm joined as usual by Nadia Idle. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today, we're in therapy. Nadia, why do we want to talk about therapy? I think it was your idea this one. Yeah, yeah, it was. So basically, I've got this central question that I'm interested in. And that's about whether it's possible for me to reconcile my collectivist politics with the fact that individualistic kind of Freudian psychotherapy has had a massive influence in my life.

So to unpack that a bit, I would say that politically, I tend to argue for a focus against introspection and, you know, the sort of looking inside oneself, identity, etc., which is stuff that we've talked about on. this show. And an acid way is kind of, we've talked about this as well, is recognizing the value of getting out of your head and doing things with other people and those being transcendental experiences in many ways. But I, probably the most transformative effect of my life has been through very individualistic, looking inside myself, looking at my history, looking at my childhood therapy when I kind of hit rock bottom a few years ago, which I might talk about a little bit later. So how do we explain that this kind of introspection and internal work, how do I make that fit or can it fit with a collectivist politics is really the question?

I suppose it fits into some of the other longer term interest on the podcast, such as things like how does it relate to consciousness raising and other things we've talked about you know the epidemic of anxiety disorders and depression etc and all of that extra pressure that's been put on people by the pandemic etc all three of us took part in a sort of online consciousness raising group when when the first lockdown happened you know i think it's a really useful topic to to extend some of our other previous discussions and give a give a new angle on Yeah. There's also just a perpetual question of like in generic terms, because is therapy something kind of radical should approve or not? Because, you know,

is it just helping people to adapt to circumstances that need to change? Or is it helping people survive a set of circumstances that aren't going to change any time soon? And thereby, you know, be in a better position to try to change them when the opportunity arises. It's the dilemma around lots of cultural forms we've talked about, you know, is it escapism or is it utopianism? So I think that kind of dynamic is, is really sort of important, I think, to think about. Yeah, and I think one thing that we want to chat about is this idea of therapy, like what we actually mean by it and what are the different forms of things that we would categorize as therapy.

And I think one thing that we were talking about before is this idea of therapy as cure versus therapy as kind of general life coping. And in my head, I shouldn't say in my head so many times in this episode since, This is very much an episode about what's in people's heads. In one way, rather, another way of saying it, I see those as two very different things. So whether it's about you have a problem, you're going, as I did,

you have a particular problem through which you are going to be therapistized, or as Jeremy you've just mentioned, what we think about therapy as an ongoing tool to cope with late capitalism or whatever. Yeah, that's really important, isn't it? So, I mean, it's partly the idea of the cure, isn't it, the idea of the therapy, you know, therapy actually curing something or whether it's the idea of therapy, you know, the term can just mean, kind of remedial action to mitigate the effects of, you know, things. I mean, it's the same in medicine, isn't it? You know, you can cure a disease, or you can just kind of give people something that makes them feel better without necessarily curing it.

And the word therapy is applied to both. As prep for this podcast, I don't just turn up people, you know. I had to look through this pamphlet I've got called Red Therapy by this sort of libertarian communist group called Big Flame, released in the early 1970s. And it's really interesting actually that one of their problems was a little bit like the way Nadia set it up where they were going, look, you know, we know that we need to have sort of like group processes and we know that we need to think through the relationship of therapy to politics, but it just happens that loads of us, loads of members of

this group, loads of people of the left at that point are in individual type therapies. And, you know, the way that they understood that was they didn't want to put off dealing with those things until after the revolution that they thought were coming. But also the political groups just didn't have any sort of therapeutic, the political groups are involved in, didn't have any sort of therapeutic function, you know, they didn't start from people's individual problems. And so their thing was very much more the sort of therapy is life coping in order to be able to embark on wider politics.

And that's what they were disgruntled about, the separation of those two things, the separation of that, you know, this individual therapy which will get us through and allow us to become political activists, whereas the political activism didn't incorporate that. And what they were looking for is a way to incorporate that. And so they experimented with like sort of group therapies, et cetera. I have no idea how successful that was. I just thought it was interesting. It was a very similar sort of problem. I mean, it's interesting that they've come to it. And I think, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, they talk about it as therapy rather than a as consciousness raising, which I think seem to be two different ways at coming at, when you're

talking about, I think in this case, we're talking about therapy as life skill or therapy as remedial or therapy as coping rather than as breakthrough and cure. Am I right? Because if we're talking about these are the ways that you're able to live better as an activist or cope better, I think it's interesting that, you know, with the work that we've done, we've come it from much more of a collective, a consciousness-raising kind of frame, even though, of course, both overlap. Yeah, in that pamphlet, they'd come through, at least some of them had had experiences of consciousness raised as part of the feminist movement in the 70s.

Right, okay. And the idea in that was that they were saying, look, individual experiences or individual internal work, if you want to put it that way, was basically sort of looked down on, and like the emphasis was too much on structural causes, if you want to put it that way. So their intervention was to try to rebalance that in some way so that you could take more account of what we might think of as individual ways in which sort of mental distress is processed. But without sort of losing the idea that mental distress, it must be caused at least partly and indeed quite a lot of mental distress, you know, it must be caused by the sort of social structures that we're involved in. And you can sort of, you can understand that that has to be true, but because you can look at the differences in. in reporting of mental distress amongst different groups, basically.

You're much more likely to experience mental distress if you're poorer than richer, much more likely to experience it if you're unemployed in particular. And then in the spirit level, which is this book about inequality from Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, thank you. They've got a big thing in there about how, you know, the more unequal a society you live in, the more likely you are to become mentally unwell in some way. See, I, this is it.

So this is actually coming at my problem from another way because my political head wants to agree with you because we have similar politics around this stuff. I just don't know to the extent that I believe that, based on my own experience with psychotherapy. I just think there's a percentage of shit that happens to people, which of course in practice becomes related to the structural conditions that we live in. But that's not where all mental distress comes from. It just isn't. So I guess I'm a little bit wary of totally agreeing with that position. You know, people go through stuff that

happen in their families and stuff that they see and stuff that they witness, which are traumatic, which are not as wrapped up with the structural and societal issues as other things, like, you know, saying capitalism is distressing or patriarchy is distressing. Well, yeah, no, I sort of agree with you. But basically, the thing you have to account for is similar events can have very, very different impacts on different people. And like a lot of that is to do with the sort of resources you've got. Some of that is actually like cash resources, but it's also like psychological resources. And a lot of that is to do with your position in society and the meaning you give to those events, how you incorporate them into a life story, etc. Those are not the same

throughout society, if you know what I mean. You know, that's, of course they're not the same from people from the same income bracket or, you know what I mean? It's obviously there are individuals and and the social. It's very complex mix altogether. But you can make sort of, you can look at like statistical evidence and say there must be some level of social impact on all of this. Not that all distress is social. Probably is actually because of social beings. But you know what I mean? It's not as simple as saying, oh yeah, capitalism causes mental distress. And if we remove capitalism, mental distress will go away. That's just not simply not true. You know, living is very hard. I mean, the picket in Wilkins and stuff, I think when that bull came out,

I ended up doing panels with each of them at different places. One of them was in Ghent, of all places. And, you know, it's an interesting argument they've got about how the relationship between social inequality and stress. But they're also, they had a really weak, through a theoretical understanding. I thought, well, what the connections might be. And, you know, there is a certain tradition of kind of Marxian critique that would say,

well, for example, you might be more likely to suffer certain kinds of social distress. come from, you know, certain sections of like the professional classes or the petty bourgeois than if you come from a working class community, which is a very solid, high levels of social capital, like a solid, high levels of solidarity, high levels of kind of mutual support and the kind of neuroticising effects in some ways of capitalist culture, you know, are kind of more experienced by people who are more, in some ways, less defended from it by these kind of layers of community. I mean, it's a dangerous argument line about reasoning to go. down because it takes you to a place called Blue Labor. I mean, my own experience would suggest

there's something to it, to be honest. One of the reasons why individual remedial psychotherapy is so much associated with the sort of professional classes. Obviously it is for really obvious reasons. Like you're more likely to want to do like, you know, psychoanalysis if you've, you know, if you've got a degree, you think of yourself as belonging to this culture that it's part of. But my experience would also suggest there is something to that. There is something to the idea that well, it was kind of emerged as a set of practices designed to treat the effects of, you know, the fact that it's true that shit happens in people's families. The shit that happens in people's families, for example, is going to hurt you more if you're

completely dependent on your family. You're living in a social context in which, you know, you're not in a kind of extended network of neighbours, relations, families. You're just, the nuclear family is this very kind of contained unit and almost all of the kind socialising that children do is kind of within it to some extent and you're very sort of dependent on it to some extent like the intrafamilial relations in the nuclear family they can become much more highly cathected to use the psychoanalytic jargon like there's much more kind of emotional energy invested in them than they are in other contexts you know and I think there is

something to that actually but also like do you feel like there have been you know like this is anecdotal. I don't have any proof of this, but I feel like there's shit loads of people on the left who are in therapy or have been in therapy or counselling or whatever of various different things you'd call it. And I don't feel like that's been talked about as a phenomenon. Is this because therapy is more available and it's less taboo and so more people in general are doing it? is it that generationally things are a lot less stable and predetermined for people so people feel more lost or mentally unhinged whichever way that is or is just being left wing really intense and a difficult life choice at the moment in 21st

century Britain I just don't think it's true that there's more people in there like you can talk about a thing called the left that coincides in some way with the set of people in therapy. I mean, I might be wrong, but I'm guessing that 90% of the people you know on the left, they belong to the sort of professional classes in some way. I mean, I don't think that's not true, but a lot of them, yeah. Do you think there's any kind of demographic sort of consistency

to the people you're identifying as? Yes, so I'm talking about people, I mean, I wouldn't say professional classes, so I wouldn't define it that way. I would define it as people who are, for lack of a better word, who are activists rather than people who have left-wing views. So if I... Do you know many activists who don't have a degree? Yes.

I wouldn't say it's the majority, but yes. So hold on, let me finish my point if you're going to ask that question. So I have a wide-ranging set of friends from all around the world and in the UK, people who are in politics, who are not in politics, etc. And again, this is an observation. It's not statistical. I've not done a whole study of this, but it feels like looking at it, people who have been active in politics in the last five years, there's more of them in therapy than my friends

who are not active in politics, who might be left-wing. They might have a similar analysis, but they're not involved in anything. So that's a total hypothesis, and of course it might not be true. People who are activists might well take action about feelings of mental distress, which means going to therapy or whatever people might not take action on that and go to therapy. I'll just say that of the young people I know that the levels of mental distress up to sectioning that goes on, it's just shocking, it's just so prevalent. And statistically as well, you know, the number of young people who report in mental distress, particularly over the last couple of years, but going back further as well, you know, just seems to be huge.

So that's not the same as being in therapy. you know, a lot of these, a lot of people don't have the resources to go to therapy and there's virtually no provision via the state of, a credibly small amount provision via the state and what there is is CBT, which I'm sure lots of people do find useful. But yeah, so I'm just not, I'm not sure. I mean, I think it's much more likely to be that people who are political activists have the sorts of resources to be able to go and, you know, not necessarily financial resources, but the resources, the resourcefulness, to be able to go and take action about mental distress, whether that means that there is more mental distress,

amongst people on the left, I'm not sure. There's a track called Outroduction to Diagnosis from the 1997 album by hip-hop producer, Prince Paul, and the album is called Psychoanalysis. It's a really good album. And just in case you didn't know, this is called Psycho, Psycho, Psycho, and then all of this. Prince Ball was the producer on the classic, uh-huh, uh-huh. album, for example, three feet high and rising. And it was really Prince Hall's Paul's production that made it.

He's a sort of underrated figure of the golden age hip-hop. And this is probably his most, his best-known kind of solo work. So with the whole argument, is like, is it social, as it individual? There's just this huge element of chance that happens

as you go through life. Do you know what I mean? You step one way and not another way and you could get, you know, knocked down by somebody. Do you know what I mean? There's just this huge amount of chance. And then you've got the existential sort of problems of life, which is death, basically. Well, I think it is something we'll have to come back to later, isn't it? I mean, because the general increase in kind of, you know, people having poor mental health is really striking, especially for young people. I think it touches

on one of the distinction Nadia was trying to point to. Like on the one hand, there's people having specific issues which are to do very specific life experience. And on the other hand, there's people feeling generally unhappy because, you know, the future looks really bleak and because, you know, and because levels of capitalist alienation are very high and, you know, sources of optimism and sources of kind of collective joy of our love. And I think those are two, they're obviously not completely unrelated. And I think one of the things we're trying to tease out is the relationship between those two sets of things. But I also think we are in a historical situation where people who have had perfectly happy, stable childhood and have been given all

those resources, when faced with the nature of the historical moment we're in, can, you know, suffer really debilitating distress. You know, my observation about one of the things has been going on in the sort of therapeutic community and in the kind of wider kind of psychological and psychiatric profession over the past couple of decades is a real difficulty in confronting that situation. Because the thing that people really are worried, I mean, by far the most common mental health diagnosis today's depression and that didn't used to be the case it used to be other things you know and that's partly because terminology's change and it's partly because the way with symptoms are classified et cetera change but there is still a pretty I think there's I think there's a

good argument from the evidence I've seen that there is a genuine like significant increase in clinical depression clinical depression is quite different from like the kind of symptoms that for example psychoanalysis was kind of invented to treat you can talk about the history of things like melancholy and melanchonia etc but even you know I mean people who like to do histories of this stuff they like to go back and go on about having the renaissance there's all this literature about melancholy but I kind of take issue I don't think melancholy like I's described in the early modern literature which is usually to do kind of failed romances and stuff it isn't the same as the sense of kind of existential despair that is at the root of a lot

of people's clinical depression these days and my my guess is my sort of gambit it would be depression is not something that can actually can be addressed by conventional, by the therapies, but the therapies that were developed over the 20th century for the purposes of helping people who are experiencing a set of psychological symptoms and issues, which were fairly typical of, in particular, as I keep saying, of people in the professional classes sort of undergoing the particular kind of historical dislocations produced by advanced industrialisation and that kind of thing. So I think all these things, can be true at the same time. It can be true at the same time that, like, someone, you know,

someone today could well be, still find it very, very helpful to have psychoanalysis, whatever, if they're experiencing a set of conditions, which are pretty similar to the conditions which somebody belonging to a similar social group might have experienced 80 years ago. And it can also be true that there's a whole load of people, including friends of ours, including people with lots, who are experiencing a quite different set of symptoms because of a quite different set of circumstances, which are much more. difficult to treat using all those methods. I mean, I've had, it was only six months, which, you know, within the tradition is considered almost nothing. And it wasn't kind of everyday classical

psychofroidian analysis. It was like once a week, psychanalytic-based therapy with a therapist. He was very good and was very kind of theoretically informed, very kind of was the most, she was the best person I could find in London, really, who knew about things like sort of post-structuralist theory, you said I wouldn't feel that. Talking to someone who didn't understand. I can't believe you found the person to match that or at least partly match that. Wow. Amazing.

And she was good. But I only did it as like a matter of course. I did it because, you know, Jay was pregnant and I'd always said. I don't, to be honest, what I'd always said was if I'm going to become a dad, I'm going to do at least six months of therapy just to make sure. And if it's going to be a boy,

I'll have to do at least two years. Because I'm having enough trouble with my own masculine thing, without having to be responsible for anyone else's. If it's a girl, because I always felt, you know, I had two youngest, I grew up kind of, you know, with two younger sisters. And, you know, at some times in our childhood, I had to do a lot of the work of helping to care of them, actually. So I felt like I knew how to look after little girls,

but how to look after little boy didn't. Luckily, we found out it was a girl and the next one was a girl. So I only did the six months. And it was good. And it was very focused on family. history and it was useful and it was but it was informed by an approach which is conscious that you know even if you're talking about your own personal experience then you know the family is still a social unit it's still social experience to a large extent but it was also it was fairly conventional

therapy because it was mostly focused on those sort of familial relationships and kind of untying them and you know sort of working out where you might be holding resentment or where you might have certain kinds of insecurity that should don't need to be there anymore. Yeah, and it was, you know, it was really useful. It was really good, like, as far as it went. I also felt like there were real kind of limits to it. There were limits to it to the extent that, you know, this was obviously a therapist coming from, you know, although it was very theoretically rich, it was a kind of fairly classical school, so not someone into sort of group therapy. And I was pretty insistent that there were limits to how far I could talk about the experience, my experience

of growing up because it was so involved with my sisters and I felt that really there were a whole set of issues that could only ever get resolved if me and my sisters talked about them and not because there was issues between me and my sisters either but because just our whole experience of growing up and having fairly traumatic childhood in various ways was always felt like a shared experience it never felt like it was happening to one of us like individually felt like it was happening to the three of us together and there was kind of a limit there and there was also a limit around things to do with the body because, you know, very theoretically and just practically, and we're going to come

on to this in the show. Like, I'm really convinced that, you know, things like exercise, like, really do literally affect people's brain state. And my therapist didn't really want to talk about that and wanted to talk about, you know, what exercise symbolized to me. And I sort of was quite, you know, and to me, that was, that was really a kind of lacanian. That was a lacanian talking to a Delersian, you know, in philosophical terms, you know, what, what does the exercise mean? I said it, what it means is it affects what my body can do. Is what I do, yeah. That's what it means. I like that. But it was good, you know, I wouldn't, and I would never dissuade anyone from doing it. And, and it might have been, you know, I could see how it could

have been really useful if, like, if I have had more serious kind of issues. I'm not totally sure she wouldn't have been able to treat some forms of sort of existential depression. She had quite a good line on the need to accept our mortality, you know, for example. She thought I wasn't accepting my mortality, which I still haven't and I don't intend to. At least you've got a position. That's a nice story. I like that story, Jeremy. Thanks. I realised that Gem's got two sisters and I've got two sisters. but Jem's the oldest and I'm the mid-list.

I've got a younger and an older sister. My role in the family was always as the sort of peacemaker and I'd use humor to sort of solve the problems and ease the tensions and connect up a little bit, a little bit, listeners, like my role on this podcast. Yeah, effing right. I mean, one of my all-time favorite tracks, actually, by anyone is the raincoat's fairy tale in the supermarket.

it. I don't know how we've managed to get this far into the show without me ever playing the raincoats. And the song, you know, includes lines like the immortal line, cups of tea are a clock, a clock, a clock, a clock. And it's just such as kind of, for me, it's one of the great kind of musical investigations of sort of everyday, sort of anxiety and just every day, just everydayness. And it's kind of interior experience. I don't know why. I don't, maybe it's not obviously to do with therapy, but it is to do with, you know, it's sort of to do with everything. I saw the raincoats at, um, on Altamora's parties about five years ago, something. They were great. You know the story about, you know, because there was a revival of interest in them in the

early 90s. Because of Nirvana, wasn't it? Yeah, because Kurt, well, Kurt Cobain and Courtney love, Kirkcumain's a big fan of the raincoats from the early 80s. There's like feminist post-punk band. And they split up and become completely obscure. And the singer, Anna, Silver was working in an antique shop in Notting Hill and Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love like walk into this antique shop and ask them to reform and support Nirvana on tour and they

were supposed to support them but then the tour was cancelled because Cabain took killed himself and considering how much like Cabain's issue seemed to have been tied to his sort of his intense dislike of the way in which Nirvana were heard as this kind of hyper-masculinist music

and these were this kind of archetypical or feminist post-punk band like they're really sort of it's really fascinating and then the albums all get reissued and there was a big wave of interest in them and you know they're really uh they're really sort of unique they're a unique sort of musical project of their own coats i just i mean they're one of my all-time favorite bands they might be my favorite band like if you know most of my favorite music isn't made by bands they might be my favorite band This is you

How do it Yeah, I've really I've really not had a lot One one one counselling session And it was I'd got given three counselling sessions because my partner, Alice, was ill at the time. And I took one of them, and I got me, I found it really,

I just couldn't get anything out of it. And I was just thinking about what Jen was saying about how his therapist was a sort of Derridaean Delersian. And like, when I think about it, I felt as though I would be, I found I couldn't talk about myself, or I felt as though I was trapped in a role, the role of the patient, if you know what I mean. And I just kept thinking about what the expectations

of the counsellor were and how I was going to communicate through those expectations, you know what I mean? I found it pretty and satisfying and like I felt as though I basically played a role and I hadn't really managed to communicate anything

to myself or to the or to the counsellor. I mean, I should probably go back and have the other two sessions and see where that got me. Did you feel like it was anything of it was because you were talking to a stranger because you were speaking just now about the expectations

speaking through them and the role. So is it that these were the kind of things you would have said to a friend or to, you know, a family member and you didn't want to say them there or did that play into it at all? Do you know what? I think I did it all wrong because this counsellor was also given counselling to my partner, Alice. So that's probably a real no-no.

Yeah, that is. I thought that's a rule. You don't do that. Or maybe it isn't. I wrote that rule. Okay, there we go. Yeah. So that's the point of, or at least one of the points of like the, of,

of counselling, isn't it? It's not a friend. It's not somebody attached to you so you can just say what you say what you like, basically. Well, I found I couldn't do that, not in one session. Perhaps that's some sort of resistance or something like that. I'm not sure. But to be honest, I didn't think I'd get through that in two sessions. And it was one of those ways, I don't think, it wasn't something like, oh, I want to go to counseling. It was, oh, these sessions are there. You can have them. So you should take them, which is probably the completely the wrong motivations to do any sort of counseling off there. But that is my experience of, that's my experience of counselling or therapy.

I've not, I've not anymore, apart from obviously talking to friends in the, in the And doing this podcast. Yes, actually, yes, doing this podcast has been most useful to me. I'm glad I had this opportunity to work on myself. For me, I'd say therapy or like individual psychotherapy, like completely changed my life. And by that, I guess, I mean my head. My head runs at a million miles. an hour and I'm always having conversations with myself and others. And through therapy, I guess,

a little bit. I've managed to quiet that down. If I put a positive spin on it, I would say I've got a rich internal life, which I just think is also madness. So I feel like I'm often mad. And speaking to other people about how my brain processes work, people say, oh, that's really exhausting. You must be really tired. So I know that at least some people, their brains don't function like mine. I'm not saying I'm unique or anything, but definitely that's the background to it. I'd say part of feeling mad sometimes is to do with being a woman in the world. And like we've discussed, it's partly capitalism. But I also think it's partly my genes and definitely my life experiences. So that's a bit, that's a bit of background. So let me think, okay, so in 2012 or about 2013, two events occurred that

kind of knocked me for six. And I clearly, looking back at it, did not have the psychological tools to like know how to deal with this or what happened. In terms of describing how I felt, I guess I felt like somebody had died, although nobody did. I felt like bits of my body were being dismembered, but not literally, not in the literature. I know there's a syndrome where people actually feel like their arms don't exist. So not literally. But I had this kind of deep, deep sadness and I woke up with it. I lived with it throughout the day. It was at work, pub, friends. I felt like my chest was ripped open at some point. And the key thing is, I thought this would go away. So I thought if I do all of the right things for myself, you know, like some of the stuff we touched on,

like exercise, seeing friends, you know, eating properly, whatever, like heartbreak or heartache or, you know, a breakup, it would kind of go away because time was a healer. But it, didn't and it got worse and it came and went in waves. So eventually I started calling what I call episodes where I'd kind of wake up with a deep depression that wouldn't go away and I felt like I was hanging by a thread and I think more and more that I was going to fall and no one was going to catch me. But I had to like be strong. That was my overriding feeling. And this would go on for like a few days and then I'd wake up one morning and feel completely bright and sunny and absolutely fine as if none of that had happened.

And it got to the point where I didn't know who I was going to wake up as. I couldn't figure out what the trigger was or what was the thing that was making this happen. But I also noticed that I lost my ability to cry completely. Like I'd never really been a big crier, but was aware that I couldn't even shed a single tear. So there was something that was kind of going on. And then things started to happen. Like I started to confuse people and date.

and not so much of that happened but these were all kind of the alarm bells but it wasn't until I got the physical symptoms which it's cut a very long story short like I had a what I thought was a growth under my jaw it wasn't it was a muscle that was enlarged because I was clenching my jaw so tight which I didn't realize that I was doing it's still something that I grapple with now um I had to sleep with the let me think with the duvet I mean I'm laughing now but it wasn't funny at the time with a duvet stuffed in my mouth because I would hold my jaw so tight and then my gum started bleeding and I went and took antibiotics again and again and again. It still kept happening until the dentist and a GP told me you need to see a psychotherapist. So that was the first time

that that happened because it turns out that the gum bleeding, which sounds crazy thinking about it now, was completely psychological because of stress. And it took me all the way, I think in 2017 when I stopped, I didn't stop partying or doing politics. I chilled out a little bit and I started searching for psychotherapists at the end of 2016. And then I ended up going to therapy weekly for 14 months. It was the absolute best intervention and thing I've done for myself. And I think the main thing is I managed to develop tools. that I did not have before. And this was one thing that my therapist taught me

that I want to share that I just thought it was brilliant because I learned that there were things in my subconscious that were tugging at me like a child at a supermarket. And the more you ignore it and tell you can't have the sweets and push it away and shout at it, the more it shouts back at you and tugs at your sleeve and throws tantrums. And so I learned the psychological tools

to be able to listen and say, yes, okay, I see what you're trying to tell me I need to do. Or yes, I'm listening, but I'm not going to do what you're telling me to do. And I was guided through facing some really dark shit and some really, really difficult shit. To the extent I can talk about it now, like I can say this stuff completely, basically emotionless. And I learned things like to ask for help because I didn't realize through this whole process I had told no one, because I didn't know that I could. So even though I was a really good listener to friends, I just completely did not.

I had a complete mental block on sharing anything to do with myself. So it was a complete, complete game changer for my life and absolutely transformed me. I mean, at the end of that, I guess I'd say, like, I'm still a massive control freak, but I'm a much more evolved human. And I still have an occasional episode, but it's not like every week or every month or whatever. and I'm more contented and I can do the one thing that I definitely couldn't do

six years ago which is to think of the future and not be in some kind of massive fucking constant whirlpool or like skirting an abyss or something so and that's it really but I just wanted to share that it really really worked for me

and yeah that's that's what happened with me in therapy I've never heard of somebody getting referred to a psychoanalyst from my attention I mean kid you not this has this has happened Because when he said you have trench mouth, I was like, what the absolute fuck is this? And I thought my mouth smells like a trench. But that is not what it actually means.

It means trench mouth is a condition that they call trench mouth because it happened to soldiers in the trenches because of stress. It doesn't sound like a sort of like classical classical psychoanalysis. I don't know. I mean, you're talking about strictly classical psychoanalysis. Like nobody has that anymore. like nobody can afford that was only ever a luxury for very rich people I mean there was a sofa but wasn't lying down on it but was really nice so far but classical classical was like you went five times a week

you know it just became your life like the only people I've known who've done it were training to be psychoanalyst or they were academics who were completely like psychoanalysis was like their whole theoretical orientation on everything like I've never known like a normal like an ordinary person just go and have that kind of Freudian therapy because I don't think it's just no one can afford it anymore. So I think that's as close as it gets, really. Moving away from me and back to like the general topic, that's very different to thinking about therapy as I want a space to be able to talk to, talk generally.

It's like, shit, I've got to intervene. Something has got to happen here, you know. It's an intervention rather than just sort of cake. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're not going to say anything about that. than it's good and it should be available to people. I mean, as far as there's a political issue around that, it's that you used to be able to get access to that kind of therapy,

like on the National Health Service, like a lot more easily than you can now, and along with austerity, but also sort of changes in intellectual fashion. That kind of psychoanalytic or what you've described, as I understand it, would be described either as psychoanalytic or psychodynamic talking about it. And there was a big move, and it really began under new labour, and it's kind of carried on. There's been a big move to basically replace that with cognitive behavioural, which is basically just telling people to get their shit together. It was about 10 years ago, there was a lot of controversy around this, and like people

I knew were sort of protesting about the kind of the attempt to roll out CBT, and because it's seen as being, it's both, it's not a kind of depth psychology, it's just kind of behavioral modification, meaning it doesn't really try to deal with kind of internal things. And some people would see that as an individualistic frame of reference, but I would say, look, I mean, psychoanalysis acknowledges, it's partly about acknowledging the way in which social relations kind of constitute us on a very deep level, on a very profound level, and that has to be thought about in a careful way. And so I would sort of reject the idea that, you know, somehow that debt psychology is necessarily individualist. And, and I think the protest against substituting CBT for any kind of debt psychology were, you know, saw it as both a sort of, you know, as kind of replaced. a kind of, you know, deep, profound experience of therapy like you had no idea with, you know, something much more functional, something much more instrumental and something much cheaper for the state. As I understand it as well, though, I mean, one of the issues is the CBT is really good at treating some things. And they are some of the things that people have historically tried

to go to kind of depth psychology for that it's not really that good for. Like it, so sometimes it is, so sort of both things can be true. Do you have an example? Jeremy, I'm trying to think of one. I'm trying to think of examples, really, and I think it probably is more to do with just stuff like, you know, like I referred to earlier, like procrastinating a lot, like just not getting your word or pattern or patterned behavior, isn't it? Yeah, well, those are patterned behavior. Yeah. And I think, I think that's also, I guess maybe I would even say a bit from my own experience. Like it, it can be the case that somebody could, you know, depth psychology can try to find kind of deep, you know, internal or biographical reasons for the fact that somebody has

got into a bad groove and they need to get out of it, you know, that can also happen. Exactly. Isn't it that thing that you could basically say, I mean, this is crude, but to say that CBT is basically saying it's just about the way you look at it, which is kind of that weird postmodern kind of position on. Well, it's a bit. And there's also kind of neurolinguistic programming, which is like the more extreme version of that. My impression is that a lot of the time now, if people get referred to CBT, basically that what they get told to do is like an audit of their thought processes. And it is the same thing you might well do, like in an early, in early sessions of a depth psychology therapy. It's just that you just don't do the rest of it.

So it partly is it's just a sort of cut price way to try and get people to do a little bit of like reflection on their thought processes rather than just accepting them themselves. And incidentally, that's also exactly what mindfulness has been used for. comes back to the thing about depression, actually. You know, in terms of things we talk about a lot on the show, Mindfulness-based therapy and psilocybin-based therapy, the two big, like, trendy interventions over the past few years I'm aware of. And in fact, I think the thing that they both claim some unusual level of success in treating is depression, actually, now as I think about it. And it claims to be able to treat depression by basically getting you to sort of distance

yourself reflexively from your thought processes. So to realise that, yeah, your thought process is, you know, might be heading in a very dark direction and there might be reasons for that, but it doesn't mean you have to sort of allow your whole subjectivity to be determined by those thought processes. And they might not even be sort of real descriptions of reality. You know, and I sort of think, I don't know enough about it really to have a lot to say about it. I mean, my sense of it is that that is a sort of quite, that is quite a potent intervention for people, you know, with depression, partly because it's derived from classical Buddhism, and classical Buddhism is predicated on the assumption that human existence totally sucks.

It just totally sucks, and you just have to learn, you just have to accept that it sucks, and you have to try and train your brain to expect it to suck, stop being surprised when it sucks, and ultimately start caring that it sucks. And so, you know, that's what it means, really, to kind of achieve fucking self-realization or enlightenment in the classical British traditions. I think one of the things that we wanted to talk about is like the importance of like having something. I think you called it. What did you what did you call it? Everybody needs something. Yeah, everybody needs something. And so I guess we're not totally buying into that. It's very useful to think about. But like in the reality of the world, like we want to get out

of our heads, right? You want to do something that takes you somewhere else. Yeah, you're right. I mean, the whole point of Buddhist practice, classically, is to be, is to not need anything, is to get to the point where you don't need anything and anything else to make you feel good or to, to cope. And that line, everybody needs something, you know, it's a line from Gil Scott Heron Song in the bottle, which is mostly a song about kind of alcoholism and how it's a social evil. But at the end, it's this really, it's this kind of, you know, moment of, you know, sort of poetic acknowledgement at the end at the end of the song where they say, everybody needs something, kind of acknowledging that, you know, people will turn to. things like alcohol, like as a way of coping with the world and everybody needs somehow coping with the world. And the reason I wanted to talk about that is because I do sort of think, you know, my own, and again, it's a casual observation just from living in the world and knowing people. But in my experience, the people who've got themselves into real

trouble with mental health issues, especially in terms of kind of clinical depression, they couldn't get out of. Were people who didn't, I'm not advising kind of alcohol as the solution to problems. But, you know, I can think about at least one person. I just, I did sometimes think if they could just relax and have a beer like once a week, like a lot of people do. Like I don't. I don't really drink anything. But if they, you do yoga, though. Yeah, exactly. If they could just do that, they'd probably be much happier, you know. And they didn't do any exercise and they didn't go out clubbing. And they didn't really do any, they didn't really do any of these things. Their life was one kind of devoid of kind of everyday

escapeism and I think kind of everyday escapeism you know it is a sort of way at which people you know cope and you know you can say something really similar about football for keying having a beer and going to the football there are obviously kind of important therapeutic exercises in some way aren't it? Should I'm going to start some trouble. Should we talk about the other things that can be therapy that are not psychotherapy? I think we want to talk about like the body and exercise but also football and music, right? Yeah, exactly.

I think I think that that metaphor of getting out of your head is a really useful. one, isn't it? I mean, we associate it with getting blind drunk or taking lots of drugs, basically. But literally, but in a more literal sense, it's useful. Yeah, but it's also I mean, you know, psilocybin therapy being a growth area alongside mindfulness is pretty interesting because one of the ways in which sort of psychedelics work is to

it's a sort of slip over the sort of like the habitual patterns of thought that you have. presumably on a sort of, you know, real material level, you know, the patterns of neurons that fire and build up habit and all these sorts of things. And all of a sudden, all of your neurons are firing at the same time. And so you can find new ways to think about things. And presuming that's how psilocybin therapy works. But you can, you could, you'd have to get that from drugs. You know, you can get that from sort of running and like getting those and doorphine highs, or you can just get it through

collectivity, basically, which is what we get from when you go to watch football and you get really tied up in it, and you just, you know, everything you've thought about all week just sort of goes, and then you get washed over by the emotions of the crowd. And there's obviously a large part of that about going out dancing, but on top of that, you're also doing the physical exercise,

you've got the endorphine rush. You're probably also doing some drugs, say, that all helps as well, and you've got the collectivity. One of the big tragedies of the last 18 months has been that collective moments have been impossible, which is why there's been all this sort of outburst of joy we're recording just during the Euros, the European Championship. Well, it's still interesting because Nadu and I both got really interested when we were preparing this, and we're still really interested, don't we, in this distinction, or is it a distinction between specific set of symptoms to treat and just general coping? part of the issue is that for a lot of people they're not really sure

like it's not clear like mental distress exists on a continuum from just generally being fed up with how shit everything is to having some really specific symptoms that are treatable and are kind of intervenable in. I think a lot of the time it's by no means all, it might not even be most, but I think a significant component of some people's mental distress is just from straight up not getting any exercise.

Like it's just not good for you to like not get any exercise. And I also, I just, and I think as a society, there's almost our society conspire to sort of deny how much exercise people actually need a lot of people, like to feel happy and healthy. Because if we really realised the gap between how much exercise, our bodies are still sort of designed to get and how much we actually get, then we would realize how that we're even more overworked than we think we are. I mean, personally, like I wasn't sporty at all growing up. I only really got into sort of exercise, quote unquote, exercise. when I was doing my PhD, back in the days when, you know, being a PhD could mean you were just being funded to write a book all day. And I had a bit of teaching. But mostly, you know, I just had to get out of the house. Like, you know, otherwise I was just at home all day working. So I started going swimming every day. And I did sort of come to the conclusion that until you were doing sort of more than about two hours a day exercise, it was more optimal to spend more time doing exercise than more time working because it was just so beneficial to sort of how relaxed I was and how much I could concentrate. And, and this sort of thing. And I sort of think, you know, the implications of that, they were pretty dramatic. Like if it's, I mean, some people would say that only applies to me. But if it only

applies to me, if, you know, I grew up in a totally unsporty family. Like I grew up hating sport at school. And in fact, I sort of really resent the way in which like P and sport were taught in school to my generation. Because we weren't, you know, sport for boys at school was just supposed to be something you were supposed to already have learned from your dad. You know, nobody ever, this is a whole other subject, isn't it? Like I didn't, I didn't realize I actually enjoyed playing football until I was like 15 because I thought it was just this weird torture you got subjected to because nobody ever explained to me how to do it because I didn't come from a family but we played football. Probably cut that. We'll do a whole episode about football one day.

No, this is vital work. We're getting. This is excellent therapy. We're not going any of this. The point being I hate it, I was totally unsporty and it was, it was purely as a sort of scientific experiment. It's partly because I had a mate who was really into running. We used to go raving a lot. And he would always insist, look, it's the endorphins more than the ecstasy or the music that we're getting into. And in the end, I sort of thought, well, I'll test it. You know, I'll see if I can, you know, get into some kind of exercise. And it turned out, he was totally right.

But the thing is, if it's true that, well, everybody really, you know, it should be a human right to get two hours exercise a day. Well, given that everybody's overworked already in our society, that's whacking on another 14 hours. hours a week, like less work everybody should be doing because they should be in the pool or walking or whatever they want to do. I think people don't want to face up to what a depressing thought that is. So rather than face up to what a depressing thought that is, people just buy into a lot of people, especially people from the left, you know, and people who are not sporty at school or people who don't want to be told that a body should look. I think people buy into this really sort of anti-exercise. Yeah. Narrative for understandable reasons, but I think

it's a con really. I think we're being conned by a society which doesn't want us to realize that we do need like a couple of hours exercise a day, like to be really sort of. I agree. What did you call it the kind of culture of self, whatever itself? Again, health and efficiency. Yeah. So the problem is, is that a critique of the health and efficiency and whole wellness industry is like completely valid and makes sense and should form part of an anti-capitalist critique. But some people use that, use it in a way that builds in that whole, like, well, we shouldn't be, you know, don't give shit about exercise because it's part of that conceptualisation, whereas actually, I mean, I think, the three of us agree, like three of us are well into, but

aerobic exercise, I think. Yeah, we're wellness gurus. We're health got. I think, yeah, we are. My advice on people on exercise is always as well, is just, I do just think of it's a drug. I mean, my coping strategy for late capitalism all revolves around exercise. It just revolves around saying, yeah, things are objectively fucked. You know, you're going to be depressed, like if you just realize what's going on. So you've got to do something. You're either going to get beyond antidepressants or become an alcoholic or become a smackhead. And like the safest thing you can do is just be an endorphine addict, you know, just accept,

you know, just you're drugging yourself. You're doing hard exercise with the sole purpose of drugging yourself and to be able to cope with all this bullshit. Because if you don't, I mean, this is why, for me, that idea of that everybody needs something is sort of important. Because I think that for me, that is also a way of detaching, you know, exercise from a kind of narrative of health and efficiency. Yeah, I agree. And the kind of competitive, optimal, you know, self-optimization and body image. Like, I think we should just completely detach all discussion of exercise from issues around weight. It's not about weight.

Like, having weight problems might be one symptom of not having enough exercise, but that's not. not why we should say everyone should have the right to exercise. We should say everyone should have the right to exercise because it really has an effect on kind of mental health. Of course, there are some people, you know, some people, I've made comments about this in bits of writing before, and I'm supposed to be doing an article about it for the new statement in a couple of weeks, but, you know, some people really, really hated me saying this, and they hate me saying this because people who suffer clinical depression, you know, one of the things, one of the effects is, you know, you can't motivate yourself to do something like exercise. Like even if you know,

is going to help. I'm not dismissing that at all. And I think, you know, and that does come back to the question of what, you know, what can treat depression? Like, what can help sort of clinical depression? And I don't know the answer. And I think it's pretty clear that I think things can help with clinical depression, but I think, well, I do think it's important to understand that to some extent depression is a perfectly reasonable response to the person. Exactly. Exactly. If you just, if you view depression as a clinical disease, a disease of the mind and nothing to do with your surroundings. So that pushes you down to completely different routes, in my view. I actually feel really strongly about this. And I know that some people really push back because it works for them

to see depression as a disease. And I understand that, a disease as you would, you know, have heart failure or whatever. And I understand why, like I understand I just can't agree with it. Yeah, there are problems there around the medicalisation of like of quite actually quite normal experiences which is a which is a problem but i think there i think and i think jeremy's point about about two hours exercise that's just marxist orthodox isn't it that's just two hours rigorous vigorous uh vigorous hunting and fishing in the end of day and then uh a good 10 hours of criticism but um yeah Well, we talked a lot about exercise

and this is a track from this seminal album by Burial and it's just called Endorphin. That point about the health and efficiency, I think it does get us into more, into trickier territory because it does get to that. One of the things with therapy is like some sort of therapeutic narrative and a sort of wellness narrative is sort of the dominant ideology in some ways. And it is the kind of therapeutic narrative that sort of denies the social. You know, psychoanalysis, it's not a sort of

things that are all in your head. It is about relationships and past events and all this sort of stuff. Okay, it focuses very much on early childhood. And there probably are later events in life probably have an impact as well. But this gets us into things such as self-help and into positive psychology and all these sorts of things, the things that really do deny the social. It's what David Schmail called magical voluntarism, as though within us is the possibility to change our lives, basically, within our own individual resources. And of course, that is going to play a role, but social structures and social, the possibilities and affordances of the sort of the social relations and the infrastructures we interact with, they, you know, determining the direction of our

lives as well, as well as just sort of luck. Like I always think about Oprah Winfrey, and she's one of these people who's done a lot to promote positive psychology, and it gets to very, very cruel and dangerous places. So one of the people she has on her show is wrote that book, The Secret. And so this comes from this long list of, like, positive psychology. It's like the way that we think. This is CBT neurolinguistic programming, but like weaponized in a way, do you know what I mean? That like, if you think positive thoughts, you'll have more positive life. It turns into, you know, you can manifest things through positive thinking and all this sort of stuff.

It gets to the end when Ronda Bern is commenting on the 2004 South Asian tsunami and says it's the people who drowned. It was their own fault because they must have had tsunami type thoughts in there. head, you know. I mean, that's fucked up shit. Yeah, totally. I mean, I don't, I don't completely, I have to say, I don't completely, again, it's one of those things as with exercise where, you know, a kind of, a can, you know, stuff around like a can-do attitude. Like, sometimes people do need to get a grip and have a can-do attitude to some things. It's the politics around that that are really problematic. But again, there's also, like, it's part of British culture as well to be quite anti-that- And I think it would do a lot of people some good to have some of that. It's the politics of it that I have an issue with. I think people have to be agents in their lives as well. You can't just be at effect rather than at cause and everything terrible has happened to you. And it's because of my class and it's because of because of like it doesn't help you.

Like even though all of those things might be true. So psychologically, I think it helps everyone to move to be slightly more at cause than at effect. But the point is is that can you can you just, is it just willpower? Can you just will yourself into being, into being an active You can't will yourself. No, you can't

just will yourself, but it does start by believing that you can sometimes. Because if you're in a deep depression for a lot of people, it's like it's the not being able to see, you know, and I can relate to that, not being able to see past the actual feeling that you're experiencing

right now and going back to what Jeremy you were saying about, you know, Buddhism is not being able to see that this is a state and it will pass or, you know, if I change my physical condition, or if I go for a run or whatever, this can shift. If you're stuck right here in the now, then you don't have a belief in any kind of possibility. And that's where I think that thinking is useful. It does start with how you think. Well, that's true. Yeah, I mean, this is a good point because it's also true. I mean, depression and feelings of helplessness are not things that capitalism just does to us by accident. it does us to them in a very calculated way, like all day long. Our enemies want us to be depressed.

They want us to be depressed more than they want us to be in any other state, really. And that is part of the complexity of thinking about these things from a radical perspective. It's like on the one hand, we want to avoid any sort of responsibilities or any, and medical voluntarism. On the other hand, we want agency. Yeah, we want agency. And we want to recognize that our enemies are trying all the time to rob us of our agency and to make us feel like, you know, we're not capable of doing anything. And all those things are true at the same time. I mean, that's part of the difficulty of the situation, I think. And it's partly why, you know, the theorists who've really tried to get into it in terms of the relationship between the psychic, the social and the political.

People like Deleuze and Guittari end up producing these texts which seem to be kind of unreadable in their complexity, because it is very complex. But it is really important. And it has a sort of important history. You know, Graham, she writes somewhere about this. He writes about the idea of doing an inventory of the self, where you try to kind of work out all the different social, historical, psychological, personal, familial, emotional influences on you in a sort of dispassionate way.

And I've often thought that would be, you know, that would be like a radical, where a radical CBT variant would kind of start from. That's also like the most radical form of consciousness raising, though, isn't it really? Yeah, exactly, yeah. The other thing to think about is, because I think what Nadia was getting is, is where do you start? Because we should accept that it's a lot easier to do, for an individual to do work on themselves and overcome certain problems in that way, that it is to do work on social and material circumstances. Because that's where you get into politics and that's where you get into, having to overthrow very powerful forces, do you know what I mean? So, like, where do you start?

Because the point would be to link all of these things up, to link up sort of more therapeutic processes and understand. of yourself to political action and like these two areas are kept too distinct. And when they have been brought into everyday life, they've done the banishment of politics, which is a lot of the CBT newly linguistic programming and that sort of stuff. But I think it goes back again to what we were just saying about agency. Like, do you see yourself as an agent of change or not? I would have said when I was going through a hard time, I would see myself as an agent of change politically 100% as I had since I was 19 and got involved

in politics. So I'd see myself as someone who can make social change and push for social change and that is what I spent the vast majority of my time in work and outside work doing. But I didn't see myself as an agent of change for processes that were going on in my head. So in fact, for me, it was the other way around. And I think, you know, I don't think I'm the only one. there. I think the vast majority of people maybe, or maybe not. There's probably loads of other people who think, right, I want to change something about myself and how I

think, this is how I'm going to do, because it doesn't work for me anymore. So this is how I'm going to do it, but I don't see that I have any effect on the world. That model exists as well. And then there's people who don't see themselves as agents of change of whatever. That's really interesting because when I

think about it, I think it's, I'm the opposite. I think my own mental health is much more tied up with the ability to make meaning out of the world and to see myself, position myself in the world, and in that way to see myself as an active political agent, like that and getting enough exercise seem to be the two things that I need to be in place

in order to feel mentally good. And yeah, so the idea that like internal work inside my head is separate to those two things is something that sort of didn't come up to me. That might just be that haven't faced up to it, or it might just be that we have different ways, you know, we're different in that way, do you know what I mean? But yeah, and then there are people in the world

who are completely driven. And I think talking about being driven and having that level of agency is always seen as like a capitalistic thing. And I think object to that. Like I think people should be driven. They just shouldn't be driven to do things in their lives and trample over other people in a really horrific way.

And I don't think both things go together. I think that it's a hangover at least culturally in the UK from the kind of like left-wing welfare state job for life thing that you shouldn't be thinking, okay, what do I want to do in my life right now? And what do I want to do in my head right now? Like what's serving me and what isn't serving me? Well, that's a good point. Yeah, that's, I mean, I think it's true.

I mean, one of the features of living kind of hyper-advanced capitalism is this sort of, you know, I think I've mentioned this before on the show, this experience of, you know, what I call compulsory. re-reflexivity, which is sort of, you're forced into a position of relative freedom, relative uncertainty, relative interdementcy in all kinds of areas of life, like in sort of personal relationships, in work, you know, how we cope with that situation is, is really what determines our mental health a lot of the time. I mean, this is an interesting point, because we talked about CBT. Well, one of the people championing CBT was the psychologist Richard Layard, who's a big, who was kind of really associated with kind of positive psychology and

what, you know, what Will Davis called the happiness, the happiness industry. But Layard was also, was, I remember this was a few years ago now, he was kind of, you know, he was, he was one of the people Ed Miliband was sort of drawing on when he was trying to first make his break with new labour. Because Layard was saying, look, people don't want choice in like public services, people just want them to work. You're just stressing people out, making them choose all the time because that is a kind of indicator of the way in which you know you can't separate these things from from politics and from the need to create institutions and I think I mean a lot of what we're saying ought to happen in or would need to happen in order for

really effective therapies to be available for people that weren't just palliatives that would ultimately make the situation worse and that were could address all of these issues from like you know in the personal you know familial biography to kind of sociopolitical or economic structures and change, I mean, for that kind of therapy to really be available to most people, you would need just a massively better funded, you know, public mental health service. And we don't have that. It was an important part of the Labour manifesto at the last two elections. It probably won't be at the next one unless the current leadership changes. Yeah, I was just thinking about what you were saying.

And I think actually for me, it's more that the big political events or the big positive political events kind of override like my own, you know, mental struggles or whatever. So I feel like my internal processes are overridden by kind of world political events. But I wouldn't say that I'm the same as you as in what's happening in the world necessarily or what my effect is on the world that makes me feel more mentally happy or stable or whatever. I think a sort of DeLurzian politics would be something like that, though, where you have these sort of events or moments of excess, as I've called and before,

where, you know, you've basically taken out of yourself and you go beyond your subjectivity. But then you have to, you also alternate that with, like, sort of analytical groups. And they call it analytical war machines, I think, which have just been, you know, collective group sort of sessions in which you could try to process what was going on, you know, both internally

and in terms of what should be done next sort of political groups. Isn't that just a chill-out room and a good party? I'm not for that as well. But you know what I mean? I was just thinking, oh, the hacienda should be built and all the rest of it, like, as you were saying that, and I was thinking, okay, well, if you've got the

utopian future, we started talking about utopian futures. I was trying to think about what were the other things. And, you know, in the same way that when we did a, when we did the workshop on the joy consultants, people were like, we want creches for adults. We want these reflective chill-out spaces.

And I think, you know, some of that stuff can be unpacked there as well. That's one of the things I liked about the consciousness raising group is that you start of individual experiences. The thing we haven't managed to do is then to take that so that connects up with the sort of fully global sort of structural nature of those constraints and then moves to a strategic mode in which you try to think, well, what can we collectively do about that? You know, how you get at that on a mass level, well, that's probably the key, isn't it? Yeah.

This song by Bongwater, kind of 80s, American. That's an alternative band. And it is a really interesting, weird. It's a sort of partially spoken word. And it is sort of reflecting on the complex relationships between sort of politics, activism, therapy, need, etc. And that is really interesting. It's a piece of music.

Kill the bankers, kill the cops. Kill him, her and me. Kill them. all the CBS, NBC, ABC, TBN, CNN, HBO, live at five, MTV, street, break, audio weekends, and sell it justly revealed. Aroldo, old, poor proof, Arsigno, Regis and Kathleen. Do we have any advice for people, like, about therapy? I mean, I suppose everything we've said does amount to, like, potential advice,

although I also don't want to dispense advice and pretend to people that I sort of know what, I know what I'm doing. I mean, one thing, this show started out being about, you know, about, you know, acid communism, acid communism. And people, I often get asked, not often, but fairly frequently I get asked by a friend, like, who's interested in the idea of, like, psychedelics as a potential kind of therapeutic intervention or a mode of kind of constant expansion. And like, and should they seek it out? And like I said, when we were recording the show, like, all I can ever say about that is just, I don't know. Because, like, my big period of experimenting with psychedelics is when I was 22 years old and I had nothing. I had loads of time on my hands.

And so I have no idea. For someone who isn't 22 in like 1993, like with loads of time on the hands for the next five years, I don't know if that is a good idea or not. I mean, Nadia, you know, from both our experiences, like fairly classical, you know, psychodynamic psychoanalytic therapy was pretty useful, wasn't it?

And you know what? I'm also going to, I don't know whether this will make the idea or not. And I'm not what, like, dispensing this as universal advice, but I am remembering something like a couple of friends, like good friends over the years have said to me was really good advice I gave them when they were feeling depressed that changed, that did change their attitude.

And it was only this. It was that, look, most people are, most people are not happy, like, you know, most people don't spend their lives in a sort of, you know, in a sort of blissed out state most of the time. And I think, and one issue, and this is something David Smale talks about, the radical Marxist psychotherapist who Kira said, really, and lots of people have talked about, you know, as a dad, it's something I have to keep, I found really useful kind of trying to explain to children. Like, a lot of people do think that they're the only people who feel

sad, or it seems like everybody else seems to have their shit together. And this is, this was a David Smale thing. He said, look, no one has their shit together. No one feels like they've got their shit together. Like, however successful or happy, and everybody else looks, like, and no one feels like that. And especially today, like in sort of late, you know, advanced capitalism, like, we're all sort of clinging on to a certain extent. That is for me personally the most useful thing, the thing that does stop me like spiraling into permanent depression is just realizing and accepting that look objectively, things are fucked. And so you might as well not go mad and spiral into total depression because doing that isn't going to achieve anything. It's going

to make me better. And so having realized that, you might as well just do whatever it takes, you know, figure out whatever it takes, does it keep you saying, and not feel guilty about it, not feel like a failure for it? Well, you mentioned David Schmiel, and one of his, his sort of analysis of therapy is, in some ways there's a huge placebo effect in therapy, and it seems that doesn't make too much difference at what technical type of therapy it is.

What he thinks is going on is that people are getting comfort and support because of an experience of solidarity in which they don't get solidarity very often. So if there's another lesson in this is, you know, where you're able, you know, try to find relationships of solidarity of other people. Just be nice to people as well, like don't be a dick. Now that's good advice. Now that's psychiatry.