Six questions: Peter Wilson

Peter Wilson is a consultant child psychotherapist and Clinical Advisor for ThePlace2Be, having previously been Director of YoungMinds for more than a decade. He has also served on committees and enquiries to do with national developments in CAMHS provision. He has, he says – with a touch of the humour he advocates below – written “loads of papers and chapters all over the place” and is author of Young Minds in Our Schools.

1. What brought you into this kind of work with young people?

It happened a long time ago when I was “young people”, I suppose. At first, my work at that time (as an unattached youth worker) was a way of carrying on being young and sorting myself out. Out of those early experiences, I went on to be a social worker with very disturbed young people in New York, and later a child psychoanalyst with Anna Freud in London. By the time I had done all that, the scene was set. For me, young minds mattered the most. Get the foundations right. Whole lives are at stake.

2. When you hear kids referred to as “brats” and adolescents labelled as “feral teens”, what’s your chief thought or concern?

Dictionary: brat, a child, “especially an irritating one”. Yes, I know! … and I know one or two adults who could qualify for that title, too. But let’s face it, by and large, children have good reason for being brats, given what a lot of them have to put up with, living with “irritating” grown ups. And “feral”? Well, that just means “wild” and why shouldn’t teenagers be wild from time to time? For me, what’s important is that we remember our own youth, yet keep firm about the boundaries. Keep on trying to make sense of what’s behind the “brat”.

3. If you could make one decision as prime minister that would enhance children’s mental health, what would it be?

Oh, get things right from the the very beginning. Do whatever you can to make the conditions right for having a baby! We know a lot about how the brain develops and how security of attachment to the mother or caregiver matters above all else. So improve midwifery and health visiting services: train them better so that they know more about they are doing. Make sure young parents get good support and education before and after birth and through those early years. Help them to have fun. Pay them, if need be, to be the builders of our people. Just marvel at it all.

4. Without breaking confidentiality, can you share something from your client cases that you’re pleased with?

It’s catching the moment. Touching the true. For much of the time, all of us, clients or otherwise, do our best to hide whatever is frightening us. Usually, we’re scared of losing something or other – our loved ones, approval, control, sanity. So, we are always on the alert and it seems to me that psychotherapy is about reaching a point, a moment, when the nature of that fear can be felt and acknowledged in the “presence of the other”. As a therapist, you have to work hard to gain the trust for someone to trust you with that. I’ve managed that from time to time and I’m pleased about that.

5. Anything you would “undo” if you had the chance to live your practice again?!

Curiously, not much! By and large, I’ve been pleased with how things have gone in my practice. Of course, I would have liked to have been more effective with some of the people I have worked with… but probably, there was a limit to what I could have done anyway. The thing I would undo, though, is the kind of slavish, devout allegiance I gave, for a while, to the school of psychotherapy that “parented” me. I should have grown up quicker and been less precious, less arrogant, more open to other schools and approaches. More honest, in other words, that I didn’t know the half of it, like everyone else.

6. A final word?

Laughter! Too often so many psychotherapy gatherings are bathed in a kind of pious bleak sombreness. Humour is seen as defence, a denial of pain – whether in direct work with clients or in case discussions. On the contrary, I see it as an acknowledgment, a registration; yet a relief, a lifting of the pain so you can see round it a bit better. Laughter not in derision but in compassion. We’re all in the same boat.