My colleague and friend, the psychotherapist, author and campaigner Paul Gordon, has died aged 70. Although he shunned the spotlight, Paul was an influential figure and a unique voice in the world of psychotherapy. His political commitment and determination to improve people’s lives led him to train as a psychotherapist at the Institute of Psychotherapy and Social Studies in London in the late 1980s, and later at the Philadelphia Association, founded in 1965 by RD Laing and colleagues for established ways of thinking about and responding to distress.
Paul became chairman and was a strong supporter of the unique sanctuary and asylum that their therapeutic homes have long provided to all in need. Indeed, facilitating access to low-cost or free therapy was important to Paul, who also worked with young people at the Open Door in North London, at Freedom from Torture, and helped set up the Free Psychotherapy Network.
Paul was born in Glasgow to Stanley Gordon, a businessman, and Wilma Donaldson, a speech and play therapist at the Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic. Paul attended St. Aloysius College and then studied jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow. He graduated in 1974 and subsequently worked at the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties, organizing the first Scottish Conference on Children’s Rights in 1978. of the dreaded tawse (leather belt). In 1980 he moved to London to work for the Runnymede Trust, where his prolific campaigning and writing focused on racism, discrimination and social policy.
Among his later works, Paul documented the work of the Philadelphia Association in An Uneasy Dwelling (2010), building on a therapeutic vision he set out in Face to Face (1999). In possibly his most important book, The Hope of Therapy (2009), he compared good therapy to the qualities of a good friendship, urging: “A welcome, a hospitality, an attunement, an attention, a suspension of self-interest… . a commitment, a dedication to truthfulness and a responsibility towards the other.
Critical of simplistic diagnoses and the tendency to use medications, Paul highlighted how adverse social circumstances and challenging life events can cause mental problems. As he wrote in the Guardian in 2011: “Behind every symptom and every call for medication is a story, and the silencing of those stories can be as much the cause of suffering as the details of life.”
An admirer and colleague of the writers John Berger and Anne Michaels, he took literature and art into account in his thinking, and in 2010 he co-curated an exhibition on the poet Paul Celan for the Southbank Centre, London. His last book, Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope (2012), was a tribute to the revolutionary writer who had greatly inspired him.
In his final decade, Paul suffered from a debilitating neurodegenerative disease. A consistent advocate of assisted dying, he chose to end his own life by stopping eating and drinking.
He is survived by his wife, the writer Melissa Benn, whom he met in 1986 and married in 2001, their daughters, Hannah and Sarah, and by his four siblings, Elizabeth, Nicholas, Alisdair and Peter.