No wonder: The problem of ‘depression’ in psychodynamic practice

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Prof. Liz Bondi and Dr Jonathan Wyatt for their generous comments and unsuppressed, helpful criticism on the earlier drafts of this paper. My thanks also to Alex Coren together with the anonymous Reader who remarked positively on the paper. Any opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.

Notes

1. My scepticism here of IAPT, largely offered by the NHS, weighs no less than my acknowledgement of the matter being not only cultural but also highly political, in that the current landscape of counselling and psychotherapy services is much shaped by political agendas (e.g. funding availabilities).

2. In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to adapt psychodynamic discourses and treatments to contemporary evidence-based mental health settings and contexts. These include Fonagy et al. (2010) Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy (DIT) whose approach to depression is more adaptive to the contemporary evidence-based and cost-effective demands made by the national mental health services today. This article acknowledges their work as offering an alternative approach that locates psychodynamic practice within the evidence-based contexts. However, given the scope of this paper, I decidedly refrain from further discussions on this particular mode of working.