The New Savoy Declaration Revision 1.01

"Feelings of gloom and despondency and fear affect everyone in the country from time to time. Few people appreciate that the vast majority of this is due to human condition disturbances arising from powerlessness, loss of meaning, or lack of understanding and love, and that disease and illness explanations and treatments for such turbulence often create what they seek to alleviate.

The scientific/medical model of human functioning of the government, and its collaborators has become a prisoner of economics and politics, and is blind and deaf to these subtleties of the human condition. Having failed to appreciate this tragic deficiency, they are gearing up for the industrialization of mental health treatments, so that everyone can regard mood management as a consumer option.

We cannot congratulate the government on its confidence in building in this way on the incoherence and failures of NHS health-care in recent years. Nor are we confident that despite their biblical status, the NICE (also known as the NASTE¹) guidelines, will prove to be any more elegantly nuanced, in response to people’s needs for relationship and love, than the NHS managerial revolution has been.

We urge the government and its collaborators to reconsider this ethically bankrupt² scientific/medical/corporate approach to well-being, and to invest in a massive educational effort that supports a wide variety of approaches to ‘survival’ ‘recovery’ and ‘flourishing’. Only through such a massive revision in policy will we be able to avoid the looming prospect of joining the world leader in iatrogenic³ mental health provision, the US. Without it, what is on offer, whether or not it is sanctified by technocratic forms of evidence, will be neither effective, safe, nor successful."

This revision is addressed to its previous signatories:

Malcolm Allen Chief Executive British Psychoanalytic Council
Madeline Andersen-Warren Chairperson British Association of Dramatherapists
James Gray Antrican Chair UK Council for Psychotherapy
Nicola Barden Chair British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy
Jeremy Clarke Chair Psychological Therapies in the NHS
Ronald Doctor Chair Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the National Health Service
Professor Chris Evans President UK Society for Psychotherapy Research
Paul Farmer Chief Executive Mind
Angela Greatley Chief Executive Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health
Barbara Herts Chief Executive YoungMinds
Paul Jenkins Chief Executive Rethink
Dr Gillian Leng Implementation Director National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence
Dr Chris Mace Chair, Psychotherapy Faculty Royal College of Psychiatrists
Professor Pam Maras President British Psychological Society
Andrew McCulloch Chief Executive Mental Health Foundation
Stephen Sandford Chair Association of Professional Music Therapists
Neil Springham Chair British Association of Art Therapists
Nick Temple Chief Executive Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust
David Veale President British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies

Denis Postle eIpnosis March 30 2008

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1 NASTE - National Academy for Short Term Expediency
2 see http://ipnosis.net/
3 iatrogenic - health damage due to health care