Review: The Barefoot Therapist by Brian Shepherd
Publ. 2023 by Austin Macauley – www.austinmacauley.com
ISBN 9781035805624 (paperback)
ISBN 9781035805631 (ePub e-book)

Reviewer – Diane Adderley – Honorary President of the British Psychodrama Association
This book of poems was written by Dr. Ron Wiener, Senior Trainer in Sociodrama, under the nom de plume of Brian Shepherd, while he was working, many years ago, in a day hospital. It was written as a creative and sanity-retaining response to an intolerable years-long situation. I have his permission to cite him directly as the author, given that he has, as he did at the time of first publishing, heavily disguised names, roles, stories and identities from some 40 years ago.

As the author says in his introduction:
“The poems describe the attempt to remain sane, while balancing the demands of working professionally, being a shop steward, looking after children and maintaining relationships with lovers and friends.”

The front cover’s illustration cites some of the internalised role messages, both professional and personal, that the worker holds and struggles with on a daily basis:

Management: Support the hierarchy. Do as you’re told.
Shop Steward: Organise. Resist. Take action.
Patients: Give us more. Give us more. Give us more of you.
Colleagues: Don’t let us down.
Lover: Why don’t you have time for me?

The long poem (much shortened from its original), The Ward Battle, puts the remaining pieces into context, telling of the impact of such stresses on the individual doing their best to meet the needs of all the various groups they interact with, whilst meeting the brick wall of an immovable hierarchy. Helplessness, pity, the attempt to create an environment within which healing is at least possible to some extent – all feelings invoked in me by the poems as I read: the healer as doomed, involuntary hero.

Many of the pieces are composites of a number of people and situations – Helen, Amy, Elizabeth and Miranda, The Son, Simon, Bruce – told through the life issues and social contexts such patients have faced which have brought them into mental health care: stories of suicides and suicide attempts, domestic abuse, caring for sick relatives, rejections and abandonments, and of the sleepless agony of the worker trying to stay ‘alive’ to not only the daily agonising question ‘will this client still be alive tomorrow when I return to work’ but also to their own personal lives for which they have little time or energy at the end of the day.

The book is not an easy read, but it is certainly very powerful. It’s painfully honest, compassionate, often upsetting: a book I found myself unable to focus on in one big read the stories are just too heart-breaking. For those working now in mental health settings, it may make connections with the major present-day stressors for workers, with ever- mounting workloads, financial cuts, decreasing workforces, unions with limited power, ivory-towered management structures etc. as well as the wider-world crises we are all facing.