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Kimberley

Kimberley is an honorary counselling psychologist… here she writes about the challenges and benefits of working in this particular role.

Honorary practitioner. It is an interesting and unique title that, I think, deserves a little more consideration than one might be inclined to give it in normal circumstances. It is my title as a member of the Forensic Therapies team and one that I am proud to hold. The organisation has recently adopted a new name, one that more accurately reflects the wealth and complexity of the work undertaken and the skills employed by the many practitioners within it. In this atmosphere it feels apt to think about the title under which I work. What does it mean to be an ‘honorary practitioner’? What is in a name?

As a trainee (counselling psychologist) I am familiar with being referred to as a ‘trainee therapist’, ‘student counsellor’, ‘placement therapist’ or some fusion of these terms. At some past point though, in the genesis of the organisation, someone deigned to refer to the multi-model professionals providing counselling and therapy to clients in prison ‘honorary practitioners’. They chose to make that distinction. Not denoting the work carried out by the organisation is better but acknowledging that it is different. Working in prison requires you to relax the fervent grip you might have on the aspects of being a therapist that help to allay your own, as well as the client’s, anxieties: a consistent, quiet, uninterrupted space; a regular-as-clockwork start time. Stepping in to this role, into this setting, demands that your therapeutic resilience has its foundations in flexibility; in being able to adapt to the very concrete restrictions of prison life while maintaining all the characteristics that make you a safe, honest, genuine practitioner who is able to see and hope for the best in your clients. There are, too, the unique aspects of the clients themselves. Very often prison is the ‘end of the line’; these are not individuals expressing subclinical symptoms, participating actively and positively in society or who have all the options for change available to them. Over 90% of people in prison have at least one mental health problem (most have two) and the risk of suicide in prison is seven times higher than the population average (Sainsbury’s Centre for Mental Health, 2008). These are individuals for whom help was not available nor forthcoming at or around the time of trauma or the preceding event, and who probably believe themselves to be beyond help. For many, prison is the last safe place left for them – in terms of threat to and from themselves and/or others. So working here is different. It is distinct.

‘Honour’ is central to my understanding of what I do here. Primarily, I uphold the honour of my clients. Holding, acknowledging, exploring but not fixating on the index offence, and seeking out the humanity in the person sitting opposite me, the part of them that also exists in me. Working in prison does not mean that you ignore what your client has done (or is suspected of doing), rather it asks that you see through, around and beyond the act to the person on the other side so that you may hear clearly what they are trying to say about their experience. It often means that I am holding on to the good in them that they can’t see in the hope that somewhere, in the process of the relationship and the work, they catch a glimpse of it for themselves.

At the same time, all the time, I am also working for the honour of another, anonymous person: the victim(s). I would be failing in my role if I were to neglect them. After all, part of the role and remit of prison is to protect the public from an actual or suspected criminal. It is made clear to practitioners that our work includes ‘offence-focus’, which is tough. Difficult and undesirable it is to talk about, reflect upon and take responsibility for, having hurt or harmed another, and arduous, too, for the therapist to hear and contain the realities of the story being told. Take it for granted that your capabilities as a practitioner and as a person are tested every time you invite your client to share.

Noting the numerous potholes and loose rocks in what can feel, at least at the beginning, like an uphill climb into work as a forensic therapist is perhaps reason enough for the title; recognition for even wanting to do it! Honorary degrees are bestowed by universities on individuals as a way of appreciating their contribution to a field or to society. Being known as an honorary practitioner, then, recognises the value of the contribution being made by the individual, to the well-being of those who, though on the fringes of society, are no less deserving of compassion than a client on the other side of the prison walls.

For whatever reason the title was selected, the sense of it being an honour is apparent. Being a therapist in prison, for Forensic Therapies, is a position of trust, deep expectation and true belief in the practitioner. An honorary practitioner is something I became when I accepted the placement and is a role I continue to grow into every day that I work to uphold integrity: the organisation’s, the victim’s, the client’s and my own.

References

Sainsbury’s Centre for Mental Health, 2008. Short-changed: spending on prison mental health care. Retrieved 3rd July 2008 from http://www.scmh.org.uk/pdfs/short-changed.pdf