"PsychJim"?

I thought I'd give a brief history of myself to perhaps justify my grandiose claims for calling myself "PsychJim".

I trained as a psychodynamic counsellor during the early '90s. During this time I worked with mainly addicts, the reason for which was that I was, myself, an addict and spent some time in '93 in a rehab centre in Chelmsford, Essex, UK.

I moved into broad-based mental health work and learned something about deep psychosis and its effects on both sufferers and their families.

I discovered that the differences between neuroses and psychoses weren't so acute and that the boundary between the two (neurosis and psychosis) wasn't so clearly defined. Freud is famously quoted as stating that: "Neurotics live in their fantasies, psychotics live out their fantasies." (Many apologies if I have misquoted!)

Many psychiatrists and psychologists appear to feel confident that there is a marked difference between the two and that those who experience deep psychosis, for the most part, are incurable. I find that hard to swallow.