Response to ‘Containment lost’ by Andrew Briggs

ABSTRACT

This is a response to Andrew Briggs’ paper presented to the ACP Conference in June 2017. Briggs’ paper, sobering, pessimistic and challenging, looks at the emotional pressures on child psychotherapists in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) as a result of the imposition of the internal market in the NHS. He posits that this has caused the loss of organisational containment, not just for child psychotherapists, but for all those clinicians who work in CAMHS. Briggs writes that this loss of containment is evident in clinicians’ experience of meaninglessness in their work and that this meaninglessness may lead to the despair of the death instinct. For Briggs, this goes along with the loss of professional identity as a once favoured discipline. He compares this fall from grace to Satan’s as described in Milton’s Paradise Lost. If, as he suggests, there has been a strong sense of being the favoured discipline, then maybe a dependence had grown in the profession whereby this loss now feels like a terrible abandonment. The author of this response sees hope amidst the despondency being forced upon workers in the NHS and makes the case for us to engage and resist in a number of practical ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Containment
• organisational defences
• supervision
• resilience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down!’ a mock latin phrase popularised by a US army general in WW2 and subsequently used by Margaret Atwood in her dystopian novel of 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Teresa Bailey

Teresa Bailey recently retired as Head of Child Psychotherapy in Oxleas but continues to teach and provide consultation to clinicians working with children and young people. She now works with young people at the Baobab Centre who have survived trafficking and political violence. She has an interest in the role and function of clinical and management supervision and in the effects of organisational dynamics on the individual.