I almost choked on my coffee at first, as you can imagine. The sip of this Monday morning was difficult to pass, when I read the article “A unique session with a shrink to manage a problem” in my To have to.
It’s because it contained a lot of those words against which I point my whole being, from my neurons to my heart, passing through my tongue, which I try to sharpen to say something which lodges exactly at the opposite pole. We say: “less time, always less time to manage a problem and provide tools”. I say: “Time is needed, and a lot, to listen and not manage, to welcome and not equip, because no, we do not “manage” our suffering, we go through things that also go through us. “.
Most of the reactions, including that of the president of the Order of Psychologists, leaned towards a series of warnings against such shortcuts in our health care system. Implicitly, however, we also heard what is an integral part of the problem of accessibility to mental health care: that is, the protection of the profession itself and the preserves it has managed to establish over the past twenty years. .
This week we are celebrating ten years of the application of legislative and regulatory provisions reserving the practice of psychotherapy and the use of the title of psychotherapist. The famous Bill 21, which changed the face of mental health care, raised psychologists and holders of permits to practice psychotherapy to the rank of professionals recognized as competent in the practice of this complex act. It aimed to protect the public against charlatans and other so-called therapists, while improving the Order’s internal mechanisms that ensure good practices among its members.
About ten years earlier, the requirements for obtaining the title of psychologist had also gradually passed from the master’s degree to the doctorate, restricting access to the profession to what we could qualify as a certain university elite.
It made perfect sense, embraced modernity and gave back its letters of nobility to a profession which, it is true, entails great responsibilities.
Ten years later, we also have the right to ask ourselves whether this professionalization of a set of skills that depend first and foremost on soft skills and the sometimes cumbersome legislative framework, coupled with the certain swelling of “the ‘prestigious image’ of the psychologist which accompanies it, are always at the service of the greatest number.
I admit that when we read the “cries from the heart” of graduating students in psychology not to work in the public, we can ask ourselves what has happened to the “heart” of this magnificent profession, which is essentially based on a concern for the ‘other. If the conditions offered to psychologists in the network are certainly to be improved, there is also reason to worry that a profession could disengage to this extent from public affairs, from the community which would include the least privileged.
I already had these thoughts in mind when another coffee was being prepared, before my meeting with Kathy Perreault, the psychologist behind the implementation of this pilot project within her GMF. She agreed to talk with me, however insisting that it be by videoconference. “I still like it better when you see each other’s face. I already liked the nod to my favorite philosopher Levinas.
I met a psychologist who placed neither her diploma nor a manager’s speech in the foreground, but a face, precisely, empathetic, committed to “what suffers”, ready to use creativity to offer to those who call at the FMG where she works, a welcome that aims first of all to say: “I’m going to be there for you, entirely, during this hour. We only have an hour, yes, but we have a WHOLE hour, too. »
It’s that Kathy and I share something that automatically brings us back to the basics of our profession: an experience with serious illness. It is sometimes necessary that the great existential losses graze us very closely to grasp that there are no diplomas guaranteeing true empathy, that there are these hospital cafeteria cashiers, these orderlies who know how to save us with a sincere look or a word from a shared humanity. We know that what keeps us on the side of the living is often made of an increasingly rare material: a simple and authentic presence that does not flee in front of our ruins.
What Kathy wishes to offer is this face, for an hour, quickly, which only says: “I am here, what is happening to you? »
Does she claim that it replaces psychotherapy? Never ! “The single session does not replace anything! It exists for what it is: a person who receives you quickly, instead of simply registering on a waiting list. “There is no missed session if we listened to someone for an hour,” she adds.
“Does it absolutely have to be a psychologist offering this?” »
” Of course not ! At the same time, the public is now convinced that they need to see a psychologist. »
She says: “in the meantime, for the 19,000 people registered on the lists, it seems to me that there is better than leaving them without any service”. And I dare to think with her: what if it wasn’t “waiting”, but “returning” to what the CLSCs were at the start, with their reception on a human scale? What if it was a return to basics, to something that we would have lost sight of, too, and to which it would be very interesting to return?
Kathy Perreault, like so many network psychologists, could have left to establish a private practice. Instead, she offers a human face to those who suffer, one hour at a time.