therapy

Between a rock and a hard place – when friendship and your professional role overlap

I’ve always tried hard to keep a clear distinction between work and non-work stuff in my life. I expect my friends to be able to offer, on balance, a similar level of support to me than they require from me. If the relationship is too skew then it will be meeting one person’s needs at the cost of the other, and that isn’t a friendship. Friendships are reciprocal, and allow me to trust enough to show facets of myself that I might not want to reveal in the context of work. In the safety of such a relationship I can have my own vulnerabilities. I can worry that I am less than a perfect parent, or talk about my relationships with other members of my family. I can joke, swear, drink wine, express opinions, or laugh at the contestants on The Apprentice without fear that this will tarnish my professional reputation. The rest of the time I feel like I have my professional hat on. I am in a position of responsibility and power, and I am bound by a code of conduct. When I talk or post online as a psychologist, I run the risk that my comments will be brought back against me when I’m in the witness box, or be taken out of context and misinterpreted by a present, past or future client or colleague.

I am friends with some psychologists and other colleagues from work and via the clinpsy forum. That’s a good thing. We share common values and experiences. We have shared stressors, and we spend time together. I am also friends with other professionals that know me as a psychologist, like lawyers, paediatricians, psychiatrists and social workers. Again, our work overlaps and becomes a topic of mutual interest. I also have non psychology friends. That’s a good thing, as they bring different ideas and perspectives. They let me relax, share other interests and remind me of the other parts of me outside of being a psychologist. We can cook, eat, play, exercise, explore, talk. We can play video games, make music or art, debate politics and current affairs. As a prior supervisor would say, we are people, partners, parents and professionals as well as psychologists, and we need to pay attention to each of those roles. What marks it out as a friendship is that there is trust, and that the relationship is enjoyable or nurturing.

The difficulty comes when you feel like you ‘click’ with someone who you are seeing professionally and feel that had you met outside work it could have been a friendship, as that makes it harder to stay within a work role and remain within the more neutral and guarded boundaries that a professional relationship entails. A therapist needs to respect their clients, be curious about them, accept them, hold them in positive regard and see their potential. The relationship may be very important for the client, who may idealise you and want to bring you into their life. But that doesn’t make it a friendship. The power balance is different in a professional relationship. Within therapy the client is expected to disclose a lot about their life whilst the therapist discloses little. It is not a reciprocal relationship, and the relationship is not there to be enjoyable or nurturing for the therapist. Having started from there it is not possible to reach a place of reciprocity (at least not without a lot of time and distance after the end of the therapeutic relationship). So if you find yourself acting too casually, sharing too much information, or wanting to step outside of your normal professional role, this is definitely something to discuss in supervision.

Likewise, if someone in your personal life starts to use your professional skills, this needs to be handled very carefully. Parents asking for advice about their child’s anxiety or poor sleep may not differentiate whether you are giving advice as a friend and fellow parent or as a professional. A friend who wants guidance how to access IAPT, or is feeling suicidal and needs to be taken to A&E needs to know you can support them as a friend, but not as their psychologist. We may well know the system and the right things to say, or the right people to approach, but it is important not to end up muddling the role. You can’t ring up someone you know’s treating clinician and say “Hi, this is Dr Silver and I’m wanting to ensure you understand my formulation about my friend Jane”. They are entitled to confidentiality in their therapy and trust within their friendship. But you may also feel a greater obligation to act on concerns about someone’s mental health, or a child protection concern, than a general member of the public.

It is all too easy to get sucked into an uncomfortable place in between. What of someone that approaches you in a way that appeals to both the personal and the professional? They just find you so easy to talk to that they tell half their life story, and next thing you are feeding back a formulation at a dinner party. Where do you go from there? Do you reciprocate and tell the ins and outs of your life, or give them a business card if they want to follow up the conversation with a formal session? Or the friend who just can’t get an assessment for their dyslexia, but is self-critical about how stupid they are, when you have the psychometrics needed in the office and your assistant has a spare hour on Friday. Surely that’s not so personal? Or the friend of a friend that never seems able to access the services they need. Do you step in and advocate for them? Its a very difficult decision to call sometimes. But in my experience it is these situations that are most likely to fall down around your head.

A colleague of mine was concerned that a friend of a friend (lets call her Sarah) was discharged from an inpatient stay without proper risk assessment or follow-up. He spoke to the GP and inpatient team to raise concerns, but nothing was done. Sarah later committed suicide, and my colleague was interviewed in the enquiry that followed. The coroner did not seem able to differentiate between a concerned friend who happened to be a professional, and someone with professional responsibility, and he got given a really hard time. This was on top of the guilt he felt for not having been able to prevent Sarah taking her own life.

Another colleague ended up having to drop everything to collect a friend from various complex situations all over the country as she had psychotic episodes, and would not trust professionals when she was not taking her medication and did not have a good support network.

I ended up writing to the GP of someone I shared an office with early in my career, to report an eating disorder, suicidal ideation and risky behaviour. I felt like there was little else I could do after a supervisor said it wasn’t their problem, because their actions were placing other people at risk. I wanted to be supportive, but at the same time I felt like it was unfair to burden me with the information without allowing me to act on it. I was very clear with the person involved that this was what I was going to do if they continued to confide this type of information, and they chose to write down the contact details of their GP knowing that I would share this information. Thankfully, they went on to get appropriate therapy.

When I first met my husband it was evident he was dyslexic. I did some informal assessments so that I was sure my hunch was correct and then pushed him to get formally assessed at university. This confirmed the diagnosis and enabled him to get concessions made about his spelling and handwriting in exams, and I learnt to help by proof-reading his course work. I felt like the assessment needed to be independent to have any authority, and that I could not take on this dual role.

A decade later, I started at a new post and started talking to the IT guy who covered CAMHS, who was concerned about his memory. It was clear he had a specific deficit that had never been assessed, and I owned the WAIS and WMS that were current at the time. With the consent of the directorate manager and my supervisor, I did a full psychometric assessment. We have gone on to be lasting friends, and he credits me with helping him to understand that he is a bright guy with a specific deficit, rather than a guy of mediocre intellect who has done well for himself. However he has never wanted to use the assessment formally.

More recently I spent 24 hours taking an acquaintance to A&E after they confided detailed suicide plans in the wake of a relationship breakdown. After a long time talking in the waiting room before they were seen, they asked me to be with them in the room and share some of their abuse history with the assessing clinician. I agreed, but I had to be very clear to identify as someone from the personal network. Whilst the assessing clinician was keen to make me part of the follow up plan, I had to set out clear boundaries and decline. I was not a professional to them, and I was not somebody who could take responsibility for this person on discharge as I lived in a different part of the country.

Each of these has been a learning experience and shown the importance of differentiating the personal from the professional, but it is something I will continue to grapple with both personally and through supervising others. The nature of our skills and knowledge mean that there will always be situations in which people want to use our professional expertise, even when we are not wearing that hat. Whether that is the GP that wants advice about a patient when you go in for advice about your own health, or the business coach that wants to talk about their concerns about their child, or the friend who is giving evidence to a child abuse enquiry. We need to find a way to be both compassionate and pragmatic about the capacity in which we can be involved, to keep ourselves and the individuals safe and ensure they get the right kind of support. The role of speaking to other people on the internet is one I will blog about at some future point, and brings with it a plethora of new and challenging ethical issues, not just the way that the informality of the medium makes roles blur more between personal and professional.

Dressing for the job: Presentation and the art of neutrality

Everyone seems to have different ideas of how to dress for work as a Clinical Psychologist or therapist. NHS dress codes are often generalised from nurses on the ward and make exclusions including jewellery, open-toed shoes and nail polish which seem unduly controlling and irrelevant for a therapist. Others argue that diversity is a good thing, and that a therapist can dress however they want to represent their personality and culture, and should not be judged for it. Many settings exclude jeans, whilst others say that jeans are comfortable, practical and come in a range of colours and cuts that are hard to distinguish from other forms of trouser. Are my dark blue velveteen trousers jeans because they have rivet joints, rear pockets and a zip fly? Some employers exclude visible tattoos, piercings beyond a single stud in each ear and hair colourings that are not naturally occurring, whilst these choices are becoming increasingly prevalent in society. Some want staff to dress conservatively, excluding garments that expose the midriff or involve short skirts or low cut tops for women, but is this just sexist? Some make specifications about being clean and tidy, but this means different things to different people. So I figured I’d reflect on my thoughts on the topic of appropriate dress for work as a Clinical Psychologist.

Firstly at a personal level: When I dress for work, most of the time I try to be as neutral as possible. I don’t want my appearance to lead potential clients and colleagues to make judgements about me that form a barrier between us any more than the factors I can’t avoid such as my gender, age, ethnicity, or accent. I want to appear professional but not intimidating, clean and well presented but not ostentatious. I want my clothes to be serviceable if I want to sit on the floor with a child to play, and not to inhibit me if I want to use paints and felt-tips, and not to cause offence to anyone else. Plus I want to be comfortable and not self-conscious about the way I move or sit. For these pragmatic reasons I normally wear trousers, though I do sometimes wear a long skirt or dress. I also like to wear fairly colourful clothes. I suppose I think they are more cheerful than drab colours, and suit me better than paler colours. So you’ll often see me in navy blue, bottle green, chocolate brown, burgundy, purple, turquoise or multi-colour patterned prints.

Of course I have more scope for relaxed dress, as I am effectively the boss, so no-one can tell me off for what I wear! It also makes a difference that I work with children and families, which is generally a more eclectic and casually presented workforce than settings like neuropsychology or forensics where “power dressing” in suits and business wear is more typical. Likewise my clients tend to be younger and more adventurous about what is acceptable than older adults, and I don’t work in health settings where the stronger dress codes apply. Nonetheless I don’t want to be so casual that people think I don’t take the work seriously, and I know that as a senior professional I need to acknowledge the expectations of others who imbue me with status and power. Certainly when I go to court I will always wear a suit to show I take the responsibility of advising on people’s lives seriously, and when I train other professionals I think carefully about my audience and the message I would like to convey. But here I am thinking particularly about client-facing work.

In terms of others, I’ve had to grapple with all kinds of examples of inappropriate presentation over my career. I have had members of my staff wear ripped jeans and trainers to meetings with professionals and clients. I’ve had some who seem to want to look like surfers or a member of an indie band, in slogan T-shirts, bermuda shorts and unkempt facial hair. To me this seems disrespectful towards those who have come to see you. I’ve had staff who have shown too much skin, whether midriff, cleavage, or the dreaded builder’s crack. This can trigger very strong responses in certain people, whether due to their own abuse history, their assumptions about showing more skin indicating sexual availability, or through their religious beliefs about modesty. I once had an employee with significant body odour, and had to have a cringe-inducing conversation in supervision to feed this back. However, not only is body odour unpleasant for those around you, it also creates a bad impression to clients and colleagues, and would put us in a hypocritical position when observing or trying to improve poor self-care.

At the other end of the scale I’ve had staff who over dress. I’ve had graduates who turn up in power heels and suits for everyday work. Or those who look like they’ve just dropped into a session on the way to the catwalk or tea with a Duchess, wearing designer clothing, expensive jewellery and branded accessories. It isn’t very practical to have shoes that you worry about getting wet, or a coat you can’t put down in a dirty environment, and if a client knows you spent more on your handbag than they get in 10 weeks of Job Seeker’s Allowance this may cause understandable resentment. At a more practical level, doing a home visit in a rough area whilst wearing £1400 of accessories, expensive jewellery and talking on a £600 smartphone must surely increase the risk of being a target of crime.

I am acutely aware that many of the families that we see come from high levels of socio-economic deprivation, so I would feel very uncomfortable if I felt that any of my clothes or accessories spoke of excessive wealth. I remember the feeling of visiting a conservative MP at home in a seven-figure mansion full of antique furniture, and a member of the household staff being sent to make the drinks. My mind immediately asked “what can someone who lives like this know of what real life is like for the majority of people in their constituency?” I would hate for a client to think that about me, and to take longer to build trust, or not to be able to confide the whole of their story because of it.

As a result I rarely wear branded clothing, and tend to stick with shopping for most of my work wear in department stores or supermarkets. Likewise I wear quite practical and mid-market shoes. Beyond my wedding ring I wear little jewellery. I rarely spend more than £60 on any item apart from a suit, and I don’t wear things to work that I would be too upset to spoil. My approach is also wider than physical appearance: I try to also be aware of what I talk about  to clients, in terms of whether it reflects my relative wealth and education, or my cultural values. How much of this is my personal taste or my bargainaholic nature and how much is 20 years of cultivating the most neutral appearance possible is hard to separate. Also in the mix are the dress styles of the supervisors and mentors that I have most admired during my career (mostly very down to earth people, of humble appearance) and of my own parents, especially as my mum is also a Clinical Psychologist.

I expect my employees to also find this balance between being themselves and appearing professional and neutral for clients. This includes being clean and tidy, not wearing overly revealing clothes, and being smart but not ostentatious.But beyond that I am happy with some personalisation to reflect their own style and culture. I wouldn’t want a team of clones. I also encourage my staff to reflect on what they bring of themselves to a session or meeting, whether in terms of appearance, body language, accent or content in conversation. We are often unaware of how this would be perceived by others outside of our familiar social circle (which is often defined by similar age, socio-economic status, culture, political values, education or other factors we won’t necessarily share with our clients).

For interview I would always advise presentation that is one step smarter than you’d expect to wear in the job, whilst being something you feel comfortable wearing and not so bland that you are instantly forgettable.

Finally, I wanted to clarify that although I think it is helpful to dress neutrally in a professional role, I don’t consider a person’s dress to be an excuse for how others react to them. Intolerance of appearance or dress relating to someone’s culture or religion is unacceptable and a form of harassment. Using skimpy clothing as an excuse for sexual harassment or assault is likewise totally unacceptable. A person is always responsible for their own behaviour, no matter how others look or what they do. So what I am talking about in this blog entry in terms of reactions to appearance are thoughts and feelings, whether conscious or subconscious, that may have an impact on the therapeutic or professional relationship, not actions that cause harm or fear.

How much do you have to prove? A tale of the modern NHS marketplace

I took a voluntary redundancy from the NHS in 2011. Since then I have run a small company providing clinical psychology services. I mainly do expert witness work for the family courts, which I have blogged about before, but we also offer therapy, consultancy, training, research and other services.

In 2012 we bid for a grant from The Health Foundation to offer brief psychological interventions into the diabetes service for people of all ages at the local hospital. We wanted the bid to be innovative, and so we were determined to think differently about how we structured the service and hoped for it to be commissioned. We decided we would use the grant to set up a Social Enterprise to deliver psychological services, and that we would aim to get commissioners to agree to fund the service in retrospect according to the outcomes we achieved. You read that right – we planned to deliver a service for no cost in return for an agreement to pay for the outcomes we achieved. No more “spend-to-save deadlock” in which the NHS can’t invest in the things that will save money; we were providing the service for no cost to the NHS during the project period and offering to continue to do so, based on retrospective returns dependent upon whether we improved people’s lives and saved costs for their medical treatment. We also agreed to survey the level of mental health need amongst the population using the diabetes service at the hospital, and look at whether this related to their blood test results (which are the best indicator of adherence to medication regimes and lifestyle advice, and of physical health prognosis).

Diabetes is a hot topic because it is predicted to “bankrupt the NHS” due to the rising incidence and cost of treatment. It already costs the NHS £10 billion to treat nearly 4 million people with diabetes in the UK, and this is set to rise to £17 billion by 2035 as the incidence increases to 6.25 million diabetics. Once the loss of working days, early death and informal care costs are factored in, these costs more than double. Even more shocking is the fact that 79% of this expenditure is preventable, if patients followed the lifestyle advice and medication regimes recommended. Studies consistently show that around 40% of people with diabetes have mental health problems, and around 14% of this cost is prevented if there are services to support the psychological health of patients. That is £2.4 billion pounds of avoidable NHS expenditure per year, and around £3.2 billion more in the wider economy. Yet psychological services for people with diabetes are far from universally available.

The Health Foundation loved our proposal and gave us a £75,000 Shine Award to deliver it.

We set up our Social Enterprise which we called Evolving Families. The name is designed to reflect the fact that people change in their thinking, behaviour, learning and roles over their lifespan (and a fair chunk of our work is with adults reflecting on childhood, with parents or with young people whose family circumstances have changed). A Social Enterprise is a business that is run for the benefit of a community, society or environment, and invests the majority of their profits towards that good cause. Our Social Enterprise was designed to invest in delivering psychological services that might not be otherwise funded, like doing research or subsidising people who could not afford to pay for therapy but were not eligible to get what they needed on the NHS.

We used our agility as a small company to employ staff very quickly, and we were up and running for the project to start on 1st Jan 2013. We accepted 65 referrals in the following year (52 adults and 13 children), and closed the project at the end of December 2013. Of those 48 (36 adults, 12 children) attended for psychological therapy and completed pre and post therapy measures, with an average of 6 therapy appointments each. We were able to see people at their homes, at schools, in the community and in our offices. We saw people in the evening if this was more convenient. We went to multi-agency meetings about some of the young people. And most importantly we didn’t have defensive service boundaries – if we felt we could improve psychological wellbeing then we offered services that didn’t directly relate to their diabetes or mental health, for example cognitive assessments, advice about employment, exploration of the impact of neuro-developmental difficulties or sensory impairments.

We screened 750 adults and 100 children who attended the clinics, using the PHQ-SADS (a measure of depression, anxiety and stress used in the IAPT scheme) and the Problem Areas in Diabetes questionnaire. This showed a highly significant relationship between all areas of mental health and HbA1c (the blood glucose score that is the best indicator of how well controlled the diabetes is). There was a very high rate of mental health problems, including a very worrying level of suicidal ideation in both age groups. There was also a very poor level of diabetes control; only 20% had an HbA1c score in the range considered to be optimal (<7) whilst 60% had dangerously elevated levels (>7.5), indicating that this hospital clinic serves a very complex and risky population group.

After the year was complete, we had clear evidence that our service was helpful and cost effective. We made a significant change to participants lives – not bad for 48 people getting  an average of 6 sessions of psychological therapy. Their mental health improved markedly. Fifteen people who were having frequent suicidal thoughts were no longer suicidal, 19 A&E visits in the months before therapy were reduced to 1 in the same number of months after therapy, 30 ward admissions in the same period were down to 5. The cost saved by this reduction in physical treatments was greater than the project cost to deliver. All in all we had pretty impressive results for providing psychological interventions at a cost per head that was lower than IAPT. We were Highly Commended in the HSJ Efficiency Awards.

But did commissioners bite our hand off to take up the offer of paying for the service based on the results it achieved? No. We couldn’t even get to talk to commissioners in person. The hospital told us to talk to the CCG, the CCG told us to talk to the hospital. They told us they need fixed cost contracts to put in their budget, not this outcome based stuff. The contract value is too small to be separately commissioned, and we are outside providers. The service closed to referrals a year ago, and although our service users are passionate about the need for the project and the impact it made on their lives, nobody seems to be listening. So we’ve written a business case and given it to the various service managers at the hospital, and we’ve presented our results locally and we wait, with dwindling hope that it will be picked up at some point in the future. Maybe in the next financial year. Maybe when they reconfigure the diabetes provision.

So I ask: how much do you have to prove in the modern NHS marketplace? If we can deliver a highly effective, life-changing service, and save the NHS more than it costs within the financial year, and we are prepared to accept payment in arrears based on the outcomes we achieve, what more can we do?

Video flash of powerpoint showing outcome data for the project is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdyVfGOkdD0

Service user comments about the project are here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsQDgs-yDq4

Slow burn: Reflecting on the emotional impact of working with chronic trauma*

*This post contains vignettes of harrowing material which may upset some readers. Case examples are all anonymised.

When I decided to do work in child protection, people warned me it was the fast road to burnout. Twenty years later I think they are right about the direction, if not about the speed.

Burnout is an insidious thing. It sneaks up on you as a chronic accumulation of many tiny things, rather than having an obvious trigger, like a single life threatening event that causes PTSD. A thousand small examples of vicarious traumatisation. Experiences that I shouldn’t complain about as I’ve chosen a career that inevitably brings exposure to distress and tragedy. It feels like I’ve chosen to wade through the grottiest parts of life, until I’m normed on that 1% of stories that cause the most concern. It saturates me. Pollutes my perceptions of life. It has been building up for a long time.

Fifteen years ago my two specialist placements included post abuse work with survivors of sexual abuse, a group for non-abusing parents of children who had been sexually abused and work with “complex” children and families, such as those on the child protection register. I knew it was emotionally harrowing work then. I talked about it with a good friend, and concluded that my drive was to go where I was most needed, to grapple with the most complex cases, and that I’d worry about burnout when I got there. I graduated onto a clinic for children who were “failing to thrive” and most of my clinical time being with children in care and therapeutic work with those who had experienced trauma or maltreatment. Right from the start, it was an induction of fire, salved only by the fact that it was important work that needed to be done.

It started with individual stories.

The sad silent child who ate 7 digestive biscuits and carefully stowed extras in his pockets during clinic, but whose parents claimed he had a digestive disorder that meant he wasn’t gaining weight despite eating plenty.

The young woman with learning disabilities who repeatedly played out how the daddy bear lay on top of the baby bear and thrust, but said baby bear was a liar and nobody believed her when she told.

The adult relatives who revealed at the last moment the sadistic physical and sexual abuse that their step-father inflicted, after he had charmed the professionals enough to get residence of his grand children, when their mother was unable to cope and had reverted to chronic drug use.

The maps of children’s bodies in medical notes, used for annotating injuries, including one for babies. The paediatricians sharing photographs of torn orifices, injuries, malnourishment and legs with rickets. “This one has burns on their hands up to a straight line on their arms, showing they were held in boiling water as a punishment”. No, I don’t want to see, thanks.

The little girl in a religious cult who couldn’t disclose her abuser as she had been taught it was as bad to think or speak badly of others as what they had done, and shown pictures of people rotting in the ground or burning in hell for their sins.

The boy who was conceived through rape, whose mother couldn’t look at him, and whose grandmother thought any challenging behaviour showed he was “living up to his genes”.

A girl asking how she got the zigzag scar on her stomach. The family didn’t want to tell her about how her mother tried to cut her open to let the devil out during a puerperal psychosis. They don’t want to spoil the relationship as she goes to Mum for alternate weekends. When I meet Mum she talks incoherently about spirits and auras, telling me she likes climbing on the roof to be nearer to God. She has no need of adult mental health services, thanks.

The young woman who always claims to be pregnant by her current partner. He is less likely to harm her that way. She is couch surfing at the moment, which is the new name for homeless. Her only possession is a photograph of her son who was removed at birth and adopted. After physical and sexual abuse at home, and attempts to stay with numerous relatives, she grew up in care. She had a sexual relationship with her male carer at 14 which she views as consensual.

Since 2000 I have done expert witness work for the family courts. That means reading bundles of documents about trauma, child abuse, neglect, loss, violence, family breakdowns and mental health problems. It means speaking to parents who have been maltreated in their own lives, lack coping resources and instead of being able to create healthy relationships and flourish have limped from one bad experience to another. It involves speaking to children who have seen too much, had to cope with awful things and missed out on the love and nurture that you’d want every child to take for granted. I read about and sometimes see the state of the home, with rubbish heaped up and rotting, flies circling, dirty nappies on the floor, no clean clothing, nowhere to store possessions and no space that isn’t filled with clutter. I hear about broken bones, bruises, burns, rapes and assaults. Sometimes there are x-rays, photographs or medical records. I see sadness and anger accumulated over many years of getting a raw deal. I measure problems with learning, attention, behaviour, life skills, self-esteem and mental health. I observe who denies the problems, who spills over with them, and who recognises themselves doing as they were done by despite all their best intentions otherwise.

I read, and I listen. I measure and observe. I pull the pieces together to see what fits and what conflicts. It is an active process, trying to understand what happened, how and why. Evaluating insight and future risks. A computer couldn’t be programmed to do this. It takes empathy, curiosity, critical thinking and detective skills. I am the barometer of relationships, of what would feel okay, of what is causing harm. If I felt nothing, I couldn’t do the job. But there is so much pain to feel. So many sad stories.

A little girl with curly dark blond hair who the foster carer told me “shook with excitement to get her own dolly for the first time and promised to keep it pristine so that when mummy gives it to her little sister she will still think it is new”. I nod politely. Take verbatim notes. I have to stop the car on the way home for a cry.

A teenage boy tells me how his father often pinned him up against the wall by his neck or beat him with a belt. He wonders why he dissociates when he perceives threat or criticism now and worries that he is going mad. I try to explain his brain learnt to protect him when nothing else could.

I observe the baby that was rescued from the fire. Her scars are healing slowly, and the medical treatments are painful. She can’t bear to be touched. There is too much pain for someone so young.

A mother tells me how it hurts her watching the foster carer do a better job than she was able to at caring for her children. “I always swore I’d be different to my mum, make better choices of partner than she did, keep my kids safe from harm. I look at where we are now and see it has happened all over again and I can’t bear it”. And neither can I.

A teenage girl tells me she took the overdose because her step-dad broke the door down and overturned the bed to reach where she and her mother were hiding, and hit her mother repeatedly with the broken bed leg. She shrugs and smiles, and says “its just how it is, you know”. I don’t know. But trying to imagine it makes my guts curl and my eyes leak involuntarily.

A mother tells me about the culture she grew up in, and how grateful she is to be here, even though the whole family live in a single room in slum conditions, and it is hard to find work as an illegal immigrant. If her son is hungry, developmentally delayed, and being beaten for misbehaviour at least he is safe. I think that isn’t safe. It is all relative.

A father tells me that his uncle sexually abused him as a young boy, but there was too much stigma to tell anyone and he was afraid to lose this special relationship. He still spends time with his uncle now, and trusts him implicitly with his own children. A few sentences later he says he is baffled why the children are showing sexualised behaviour. I am baffled that other people can’t see how obviously the pieces fit together.

I assess a couple that smell so bad I struggle not to gag. I open the windows but it is not enough. I go out for air every hour. A social worker sprays perfume on my sleeve so I can raise it to my face to mask the smell. I learn the phrase “body odour to an extent causing discomfort to anyone in the proximity”. They don’t own toothbrushes and show me teeth rotting in swollen gums.

A woman tells me she has put on 9 stone as she needs to have fat deeper than the knife blade is long, since she was stabbed by her ex-partner. She wheezes for a long time after climbing the stairs at the contact centre, and she struggles to get down on the floor to play with the baby. I worry when she is slower than expected to return from the toilet, do I need to check if she is okay?

The child was born with HIV. His mother died of it. He lives with his grandmother. She doubts the diagnosis. “He doesn’t look ill, the English doctors don’t know about us”, she says when I ask why his prescriptions have not been collected.

A lady tells me that she must have had post natal depression. If she wasn’t ill she would keep the house clean, but when she is ill she can hardly get out of bed, and gets ideas that the world is very unsafe. That is why she kept the children in her bed with her, rather than sending them to school, until they were no longer able to walk. She’s on antidepressants now, and saw a counsellor for six sessions, so everything will be fine. The social workers are making a fuss about nothing.

A man tells me he has exercised to pass the time whilst in prison. He is proud that he is bigger and tougher than his father now. He says the robbery was the fault of the friends who bought him the beer and suggested the idea, and much exaggerated by the victim. I am glad I brought with a student to observe, as the room is quite isolated and his body language makes me tense.

This couple have managed to sustain the acrimony of their separation for five years. She says he was controlling, violent and obsessive about having every last penny accounted for. She tolerated his promiscuity for far too long. He says she was moody and manipulative, and it is probably her mental health that’s the problem, and her jealousy that he moved onto another relationship. It makes me cross that both of them seem to have forgotten the kids in the middle of their conflict.

A little boy tells me what it felt like to be buggered. I try not to think about it that night in bed. I play tetris on my phone until I fall asleep at 4am.

A woman tells me that all of her relationships have been with men who present a sexual risk with children. They are all so different, she says, that whenever she learns what to avoid the next one is nothing like it. And why wouldn’t you move in with someone you’ve just met? How else do you get somewhere to live after the last relationship has turned sour?

The story stems of a girl of eight show the family repeatedly pushing the girl off a cliff and laughing at her. For variation they poison her and laugh as she vomits. She repeats the loop for 90 minutes, then returns to lying foetal under the table as I leave, just as she was when I arrived.

“I had a cold, mum caught it, and it made her sick so she fell down the stairs” says the boy with autism. “That is why she had to go to hospital”. It wasn’t the head injuries her partner caused, it was his fault. But later in the conversation “Daddy gets out of prison soon. When he finds us he will kill us this time”. It is deadpan. An emotionless fact of life.

The girl in the children’s ward tells me “I didn’t want to go home. I jumped off the bridge because it would be better to be dead. They say I will need to be in hospital at least six weeks whilst my leg heals”. She smiles showing me the metal cage and all the pins reassembling her bones, and counts the pieces in the x-ray. She won’t say what is wrong at home.

“He spat right in my face and pushed me over. I was so angry then. I hit him with the lamp until it broke, then I whipped him with the cable. I could see the shape of the switch in the bruises when I was done. They might have seen it, but that’s not the same. I’d never hurt the children.”

A boy tells me what is different in foster care. “It was the best day ever. We went to the garden centre. I got to look at the fish, and we had a drink and a slice of cake at the cafe. We eat at the table with the grown ups here. I got my own coat too, nobody wore it before me! And my skin is better”. The carers tell me that they had to wash the grime off the bath after he arrived, replace all his clothes and do twice daily treatments of his infected eczema. They had to get a court order to shave off his matted hair as his parents would not give consent.

A five year old girl tells me about the day she came into care. “I could hear they had fish and chips in the front room. I could smell it. I tried to walk there, but my legs weren’t working and I kept falling over”. The medical records show that a visitor called an ambulance when they saw her unconscious and malnourished. Her blood test results are marked with blue biro. Haemoglobin is captioned “how is she alive?”. She dances when she shows me the foster carers have a rabbit run in the garden.

In each family I hear many of these stories from each individual, and I see several families each month for assessment. I’ve been doing this for over a decade now. I have banked hundreds of such narratives, maybe a thousand. All involve a child or children being harmed. The stories are each unique, but the themes recur. James blurs into Joshua and Jared and Jacob. Samira merges with Samantha and Saskia and Sasha. Depression and anxiety, broken bones and bruises, filth and mayhem, conflict and violence, cancer, obesity and sensory impairment, neglect and abuse heap up in my repertoire of human experience and leak out into my life. I see those stories lurking at the edge of my vision, in the arguments partially overheard in the shops, or behind the headlines in the news. I see their echoes amongst people that I know; my neighbours and colleagues and friends.

I set myself impossible standards. I worry if my child has messy hair when she gets back from school, or I notice mud under her fingernails. Will people think we aren’t taking proper care of them? Are we not taking proper care of them? We go to A&E after my daughter burns her hand. I ask her to tell the story before I speak and she says “it was your fault mummy, it was your drink that tipped over”. I feel like a failure and a hypocrite. My cat has a jaw infection and needs teeth removed and antibiotics. I should have known. He smells like the couple I assessed at the social work centre last year.

I say we need to leave the restaurant. I can hear a mother saying “ungrateful brat, I should never have had you” to her son. Outside the school a mother pushing a baby in a pram says to her friend “look at him giving me evils, he’s going to be just like his father”. I walk away. The couple outside the pub argue incoherently and their voices get louder and shriller as we walk back to our car after a night out. The child in the park approaches me and asks me to push him on the swings. People on the internet disclose abuse. In the supermarket I hear a slap and the child is crying. The woman walks past on the street with a fading black eye. They are anonymous and legion. The scale of the problem is overwhelming. I can do nothing.

Friends of friends ask for advice as they have heard I am a psychologist. Its important to try to point people in the right direction, but I am depleted. Another 2 lever arch files arrive at work. Its an incest case and mother is terminally ill. Surely there can be no more stories this bad, but there is a queue awaiting my attention. The next one has police transcripts of the interviews of all of Dad’s victims. He might be a paedophile but his daughter wants to see him anyway. The one after that they want me to see Dad whilst he is in prison for abducting the children to a different country. He believes it is his right; fathers own children in his culture. Then back to the bread and butter of court work, another family where neglect and maltreatment has been the norm through many generations. One of the children is the same age and gender as one of mine. Don’t make comparisons. Don’t go there. Change the subject.

A letter from a solicitor tells me that my invoice has been reduced by the Legal Aid Agency on appraisal. I will get £400 less than the total billed, despite not billing for 6 hours work already because of the fee caps. The hours were “not proportionate”. Do I explain again that it takes longer to do assessments via a translator? I don’t have the energy. Another one is querying the hourly rate. I should work for £7 less if I only see the adults as I won’t be a child psychologist. I ask if a psychiatrist gets paid the rate for a psychotherapist if they don’t diagnose or prescribe. The solicitor is sympathetic but says there is nothing they can do. A father doesn’t attend an appointment that is booked to fill a whole day. I have driven 2 hours to get here, and I wait for an hour whilst phone calls are made, then drive 2 hours home, exhausted. I can do nothing else with my day. Legal Aid say a psychologist can fill their time productively with other activities and refuse to pay anything over travel costs, even though the contract says that they will pay for any appointment cancelled with less than 72 hours notice. I can’t bill for materials, venues or typing. The questionnaires cost an average of £5.31 each. I used 6 per child and there were 7 children in the family. Does it add enough to my report to justify £220 of lost income? The LAA ask what ‘capacity’ is and why it took me 4 hours to assess it. Is it not embarrassing to work for the family court system and not to know this or to have the sense to Google? The self-funding father who was supposed to have lodged the cost of the report with his solicitor hasn’t. He now wants to pay in monthly instalments, but my staff get paid next week. I have to turn away two cases a day after reading about the plight of the children, because I am booked up too far ahead. The wealthy mother from abroad hasn’t paid her share of the bill from 4 months ago, but the court wants me to do more work for her case. There are 16 follow-up questions from the report I filed last week. Why do I do this again?

Tomorrow is the appointment to assess the teenage mother in the mother and baby unit. Yesterday her boyfriend told me about how they met online, and gave me their usernames. Google shows me his dating site entries seeking single mothers, Facebook posts about the violence in their relationship and a video of the baby’s “sexy dance”. A solicitor phones. Can I squeeze in one extra case this month? Mother has been evicted. She doesn’t want to see her child and is too anxious to talk to her lawyers. Could I fit the capacity assessment in this week? I get an email to my personal account. My builder’s sister’s son is feeling suicidal. I reply with the phone numbers for the Samaritans and the local crisis service. I watch the news story about the children in the refugee camp and am horrified to find I feel nothing. I have reached compassion fatigue. I turn off my phone and computer and go back to bed.

I am empty. My emotional resources have run out. Is this constant aching tiredness what they call burnout? I run on clockwork. I am a robot Mum and a robot wife. I fall asleep on the sofa. I am exhausted. At night when I finally fall to sleep I dream about children with their eyes sewn shut. I can’t save them all. When I wake I go to work and do it all over again. I’m good at this. It is important. It is needed. It is never ending.

Then I pause and take a few weeks off for a family holiday. Soon after we arrive the bubble of numbness bursts. I cry watching a video on Youtube. It segues into crying for all the children I’ve met, and all the children someone like me never met or didn’t reach in time, including the parents I speak to so often. I cry with frustration at my own limited reach. I cry for the selfishness of politicians, the broken systems and missing safety nets. I despair at how you increasingly need money to buy justice, and how hopeless and disengaged wide tranches of society are becoming. I click to sign petitions. I donate to campaigns. I counsel compassion in online debates. But I am tired. Achingly tired. Tired in my bones and my guts and my heart. I know how much this needs to be done. And I don’t know what else I can do. But I can’t do this any more.