I’ve now been back at work for a month. My confidence and experience are accumulating, imperceptibly until I look back and take stock and realize how far I’ve come.  I’m now in conversation with eight people in the individual counselling section of my practicum, all of them very different from each other, and I increasingly feel that when I encounter something new, I have a repertoire of possible ways of working with the person I accompany in session. One of the challenges of working for a non-profit such as my main practicum site is that there isn’t a structured program of learning that we might encounter at a university counselling centre which takes in practicum students: in Vancouver the gold standard for this kind of placement seems to be Counselling Services at Simon Fraser University. I have a supportive supervisor at my non-profit, group supervision and other sessions, and yet a lot of time is spent on my own, especially since COVID-19 has moved all my individual counselling online. And yet I’ve come to realize that one thing I’ve gained from my practicum has been the variety of people who come to no-cost counselling, in age, class, gender presentation and sexual identity, and cultural community.  Skills can hopefully be honed over years of critical practice, but this initial orienting experience has been foundational to my thinking about the social place of counselling.

A second area in which the pieces of my life are beginning to come together is critical thinking about counselling psychology. In the last couple of months, I’ve noticed a few straws in the wind. A former student in Singapore talked to me about going to an event, and noticing that everyone quite proudly introduced themselves and the mental health diagnoses they’d received: he almost felt left out that he did not have a diagnosis, as though he did not have an identity. A second was reading a series of articles in Singapore, UK, and Canadian online publications about the relief the writer felt when they received either a psychiatric diagnosis such as ADHD, or coming to recognize and apply a more general psychological concept such as trauma to their life: again, such relief seemed to be more than a simple acceptance of diagnosis, but rather a central part of a revised life narrative. A third was an observation by a colleague that her younger clients seemed to be much more fluent in talking about psychological concepts and self-diagnosing than older ones, something I’d also noticed. On one way this seemed a welcome destigmatization, but in another it led to a kind if objectification of the self, in which selfhood was reduced to self-diagnosis and was shorn of a full range of transformative possibilities outside of therapy.

In seeking to explore these leads, I’m led to work that examines the place psychotherapy plays in neoliberal self-fashioning, I’ve made a long reading list for myself that I won’t get to until the end of my practicum. I have, however, scratched the surface.  I found a short and not particularly well-written article by Timo Beeker and several co-authors on the “psychiatrization” of society useful. The argument of Beeker and his collaborators is elegantly simple: the increasing adoption of psychiatric terms to describe identity is driven not simply from above by institutions that govern health but also, in a classically Foucauldian manner, from below, with individuals using these categories for the making of selfhood. Counselling psychology, of course, is much more than psychiatric diagnosis, and indeed supporters of the common factors approach would emphasize its status as a healing art rather than a science. And yet it’s not so easy to simply place humanist or postmodern counselling approaches on the side of the angels, and the article’s bibliography leads back to the work of scholars such as Nikolas Rose and Meghan Vaughan about the growth of therapy in different social contexts; there is much here to explore. A second strand of thinking was inspired by a talk in my department but Erin Thrift, drawing on a paper I’m linking to here, and trying to think through much more precisely what appeals to social justice made in counselling are. Thrift ends up supplementing identity-based accounts of social justice with a more radical commitment to fill social equality manifest in earlier uses of the phrase, and addressed in the work of Nancy Fraser and Martha Nussbaum. Finally, I’ve come across two interesting articles published almost simultaneously in Harpers‘ and The New Yorker questioning the current focus on trauma and trauma-informed approaches in so much counselling psychology, and exploring the origin of the concept. Both Will Self’s and Parul Sehgal’s articles come from a literary studies perspective, which is refreshing but also limited in terms of thinking through the practices of the self that occur in session. As ever, I’m bookmarking these rich and, in many ways, contradictory explorations of the larger context of counselling psychology and psychotherapy even as I continue to deepen practice.

Finally, I’ve found in the long dark winter evenings I’ve been reading more about Vancouver, this place city on the edge of an ocean where I find myself. Eve Lazarus’s Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History was a good introduction: little snippets of the past centred on lost places in the city, derived from a series of blog posts. This in turn led me to Daniel Francis’s Becoming Vancouver: A History. The book has been much praised as a comprehensive new history of Vancouver. I personally found it disappointing in that it did not reframe this history, or think more deeply about the processes of resource extraction and colonialism that have marked the city’s past. The chapter on race in early Vancouver, for instance, is titled “Intolerance,” as though limits on East and South Asian immigration in the first half of the twentieth century were a matter simply of individual prejudice, rather than a manifestation of larger systemic processes. Indeed, I wonder if it’s possible now to write a history of city that doesn’t make use of multilingual sources. The book, however, is a very useful starting point for further exploration, and it led me to Betty O’Keefe and Ian Macdonald’s Dr. Fred and the Spanish Lady: Fighting the Killer Flu , an account of the 1918 flu pandemic in Vancouver that has haunting similarities to our own world, a century later. I also read Michelle Good’s novel Five Little Indians, in which Vancouver becomes a transit point for Indigenous youth leaving the residential school system behind, and moving to build new lives for themselves and future generations. It’s a first novel with multiple characters’ stories woven into each other. If its narration seems in some ways artless, in contrast to the poetic writing of other Indigenous novelists from Turtle Island such as Louise Erdrich, it’s very much appropriate for the subject matter, its processes of witnessing and of the reconstruction of self and community. This witnessing in turn makes one aware of how Indigenous presence, despite authors’ best intentions, tends to be largely absent from standard histories such as Francis’s, after an initial account of dispossession is narrated.

As I write at the end of January, the rain has returned, for a few days at least. Catkins have sprouted on the bare trees on Nelson Street, some longer than my fingers, wriggling in the wind. The days have grown longer: imperceptibly early in the month, now much more quickly now: we gain two or three minutes of daylight as each day passes now. We walk in Stanley Park, beneath the trees, and then I return each night to my books, each work morning to sessions, in both spaces entering a forest of words.