156 BRITISH SOCIAL ATTITUDES

of the therapeutic turn. A particularly bleak and well-publicised version of this
has recently come from Frank Furedi in his book, Therapy Culture (2004). For
Furedi, the prevalence of a therapeutic ethos has brought about what he terms
‘the disorganisation of the private sphere’ through creating a sense of a
vulnerable self, dependent on professionals.
This theoretical work has been paralleled by a growing interest within policy
circles in the UK in issues relating to people’s emotional lives and well-being.
In February 2008, for example, the Health Secretary Alan Johnson announced a
major new programme to train 3,600 psychological therapists. With a budget of
£170m, this ‘Improving Access to Psychological Therapies’ programme is
designed to give people with depression and anxiety disorders from mild to
severe forms of these conditions access to cognitive behavioural therapies. This
development can be traced back to Richard Layard’s argument, presented to the
No. 10 Strategy Unit in 2005, that the socio-economic as well as personal cost
of mental illness makes it Britain’s main social problem (Layard, 2004).
Yet these theoretical and policy developments have taken place against a
backdrop of scant empirical evidence. Most of the work that has been conducted
on the theme of emotions talk and emotional support has been either small scale
and qualitative, or has focused on populations of service users (for example, in
relation to mental health).
So has Britain actually witnessed the “triumph of the therapeutic”, to coin
Rieff’s phrase (1966), as Furedi and others would have us believe? This is the
question that our chapter seeks to address. It does so as part of a mixed method,
ESRC-funded research project which examines public views and experiences of
emotional support. The project included developing a set of questions about
emotional support which were asked as part of the 2007 British Social Attitudes
survey. They allow us, for the first time, to examine a number of specific
questions to have emerged from current debates about Britain’s so-called
‘therapeutic culture’.
Firstly, we will examine whether there is evidence of an emerging cultural
consensus that it is ‘good to talk’ about emotions in general, regardless of
professional therapeutic input. Secondly, we assess the extent to which the
British public is now aware of, and comfortable with, the notion of formal
therapeutic intervention to help with difficulties in their emotional lives. Next,
we examine how many people are actually using such services (particularly
those which are explicitly talk-based), and whether there is a groundswell of
demand for the further provision of such services. Finally, we assess whether
there is an inverse relationship between formal and informal emotional support;
does use of formal emotional support tend to result in lower levels of reliance
on more traditional, informal, support networks?
Since this is the first time that a national survey has explicitly addressed these
issues, we do not have any earlier data against which we can compare our
findings. This means we cannot demonstrate conclusively the pace and direction
of social change. Nevertheless, our analysis does allow us to examine the
impact of age on attitudes and beliefs (since one might expect an emerging
culture to leave its mark more clearly on younger than older people); and the
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