Jay Beichman (1963-) is a writer living in Brighton UK.
I started writing from when I was 11 years old or so, during the last years of the Callaghan Labour government into the beginning of the Thatcher Conservative era. I want this website to be an archive for all the material I have written since then. Blogs and new material will also be available here as and when.
I write because I find it is the best way of finding out what I think and making sense of my world via my imagination. As the saying goes: How do I know what I think until I see what I say? Writing is the most democratic of art forms in that it only requires a writing implement and a piece of paper. I started writing diaries/journals. Shortly after came poetry and short stories. Non-fiction started, as it does for most of us, at school writing essays. My English Literature A-Level exam was negatively affected by my decision to spend far too long on the William Blake question as that was easily the most interesting question and the one for which I had most thoroughly prepared. Since then I have written regular book reviews and articles for various magazines and journals usually about psychological therapy as I qualified as a therapist in 1998. In 2018 I completed a PhD thesis about ‘pluralistic therapy’ available in full in the Prose section of this website.
When I was at Oxford Youth Theatre I wrote the script for ‘Hansel and Gretel’ which toured local schools. After university I co-wrote, directed and produced a version of Sam Shepard’s ‘Tongues’ which was performed at Sussex University and the Nightingale Theatre. I regularly performed poetry at the Zap Club in Brighton and founded ‘Free Speech’, a kind of prototype for performance poetry cafes. In San Francisco I performed with veterans of the San Francisco counterculture poetry and jazz scenes and in LA I wrote reviews about the music scene in the Guns & Roses era. On returning to the UK I continued to perform poetry intermittently whilst also writing prose, novels and screenplays.
I enjoy all kinds of music, especially psychedelic space rock. I like going to pubs, cafes and walking my dog Eric in various parks and the Sussex countryside. I am actively involved in the politics surrounding psychological therapy especially explicit challenges to the ‘medical model’ as expressed most saliently in Szasz’s ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ and continued in groups today such as Drop the Disorder!.
jay.beichman@gmail.com +44-07817-404562
In the following blog, ‘therapy’ is used as a term to describe both ‘counselling’ and ‘psychotherapy’ and the term ‘therapist’ is used to describe both…
Continue reading → Therapy: State of Play in the UK 2022 – A Personal View
Evidence-based medicine can be conceptualised as a three-legged stool in which ‘the use of evidence (first leg) is to be balanced with the expertise of…
Recently I presented at the Sussex Counselling and Psychotherapy AGM about the future of counselling and psychotherapy as I see it. Very kindly, SCAP, as…
Continue reading → The Future of Counselling and Psychotherapy (Notes in the Margins)
One problem, inherent in debates about therapy, is the use of the different terms ‘counselling’, ‘psychotherapy’ and ‘therapy’. There are some ‘counsellors’ and some ‘psychotherapists’…
Continue reading → Counselling and Psychotherapy: What’s the Difference?
As at the time of SCoPEd 1 a year ago I am confused by the need for SCoPEd (The Scope of Practice and Education for…
Jay Beichman Writer 