Contributors

If you are normal and non-aligned, frustrated and fuming but fair-minded, committed and clear-sighted – ShrinkTank wants to hear from you. There are a few rules to follow, which are to do with metre and style more than content. Here they are.

Shorthand (CPN, CPA etc) is allowed because there is a ShrinkTank Glossary for the uninitiated. Jargon of any kind is not. Jargon has many functions, the primary one being to serve as a kind of linguistic uniform, maximising conformity and contributing to poverty of thought. The extent to which someone uses jargon is the extent to which he or she is out of touch.

Certain expressions which might slip under the jargon radar will also be screened out and may invalidate a whole piece when they are symptomatic rather than just unthinking. There are too many to list but common examples include underpinning, embedding, conceptual frameworks, journey (as in patient journey), pathway, package, input, throughput, output, competencies, and more technical-sounding expressions such as wellness recovery action planning (sic). This is because, in mental health and in the field of helping generally, they derive from a developing technocracy, in part set up to rival that of medicine and in part to establish and bolster new and powerful professional vested interests.

The following are welcome: personal statements, vignettes, essays (up to a maximum of 1000 words), cris de coeur, poems, reportage, formless ramblings and any combination of these. Rants, revenge or retaliation are unwelcome, as are references and research, unless that of personal observation and experience. The subjective is always likely to be selected in preference to the objective.

ShrinkTank encourages what is sometimes called the idiographic approach to understanding as opposed to a nomothetic one. The first is more concerned with personal or individual accounts, the second with a rule-based, rule-making one. In most cultures they can happily co-exist but in the UK the latter is dominant almost to the exclusion of the former, a relationship which ShrinkTank will do its best to correct.

Contributors should aim to say this is what I believe in rather than this is what I dislike. Or this is what I have observed and appears to work rather than this is what guidelines or the evidence say. Pieces will be edited in the interests of clarity, economy and the elimination, not just of defamation but also of complaint – and to increase their accessibility and therefore their effect.

ShrinkTank wants to promote what contributors believe to be valid rather than what they know to be true – in the same way that diagnosis should be seen as being useful or not, rather than true or not.

Above all, it is interested in expertise derived from experience, rather than in received (un)wisdom derived from status.