24th September, 2024

The following is a brief account of the art therapy sessions with Sally Mungall that took place at CAMHS, Bramblys Drive, Basingstoke between the 16th September and 16th of December, 2021, corroborated, in part, by most of Sally Mungall’s own clinical notes recorded at the time. ( It should be noted that I have been denied complete and unredacted access to records by Information Governance at the Sussex Partnership and this includes Sally Mungall’s clinical notes for two of the art therapy sessions ).

I am still neck deep in the quagmire of investigating what went wrong during those art therapy sessions and examining the precipitous intervention by Sally Mungall’s clinical and managerial cohorts. I will be laying out that investigation in later blog posts but, for the meantime, I will share with you what it was like to be towed out into the middle of an unfathomable ocean and cast adrift under the shadow of a fast approaching tempest. I am, even to this day, still at sea and floundering.

I originally entered into art therapy with a high degree of skepticism and mistrust. My previous experiences with healthcare professionals and welfare and pastoral staff had rendered me wary and cynical. I also reasoned that my work as a professional artist would dilute the effectiveness of art therapy and initially refused to engage in the creative process, believing that I communicate better through talking. My skepticism and mistrust were quickly dismantled following Sally’s assurances and I gave myself over to the sessions in a truly vulnerable way. I allowed myself to be convinced that Meg would be best served only if I were to have faith in the therapist and her professional expertise. So, I trusted Sally Mungall.

Sally Mungall greeted me in CAMHS reception for our second meeting, again wearing a Covid mask. When we had settled in the room I questioned the utility of the mask. Meg’s therapist, Mark Birbeck had conducted all of his sessions with my daughter without a mask. Indeed, there were other members of the CAMHS team that I had noticed who, likewise, had not been wearing a mask. Sally insisted that she wore one for my protection and, ultimately Meg’s. I asked her if she would remove it, just for a few moments, so that I could properly connect with her and she obliged. I still cannot fully account for the effect of seeing Sally maskless for the first time. Sally herself observed my reaction at the time and later remarked that revealing her face had a very profound effect on me. I had already projected the face of a farmer’s wife onto that mask and was expecting her to have the appearance of a woman given to getting her hands dirty from a life working outdoors. But it was so much more than that. So much. There was a profoundly deep and unusually immediate romantic attraction that I still find largely inexplicable. It is by no coincidence that I am currently in the middle of reading about the ‘engendered gaze’, the subject of Joy Schaverien’s book ‘Desire and the Female Therapist’. It is also no coincidence that Joy Schaverien is an analytical psychotherapist and art therapist. I will return to this book and her previously published work, ‘The Revealing Image’, in greater detail in later posts.

Back in the therapy room in September 2021 I found that I was compelled to take Sally Mungall more seriously. I had already made a cursory online investigation of Sally but was now resolved to check up on her credentials more thoroughly when I returned home. ( By now I had learned to be cautious with every new healthcare professional appointed to Meg or to me, her single dad and main carer. Experience had taught me that being forewarned was to be forearmed and to be prepared for misconduct and ineptitude. Online checks of new appointees had become habitutory ). I re-evaluated the therapist sitting opposite me, checking details with an altered perspective. She was a short, thickset woman, in her late 40's or early 50's. Her voice was soft and reassuring and had the tone of a mother well rehersed in communicating with very young children. I appraised the way she was dressed and assessed her body language, looking for visual clues of dishonesty and manipulation ( Yes, really! That's the way my mind works. It's the coping strategy of someone who has suffered abuse and neglect, usually referred to as 'hypervigilence' ). It was then that I noticed something, or rather, noticed something missing. Her wedding ring. I could not be completely sure because her marital status wasn’t important to me when I had first met her and I hadn’t consciously looked for a wedding ring but there was a kind of afterglow of one burned on the retina of my mind’s eye. I reasoned that her work with children and adolescents was sometimes messy and that she perhaps removed her ring earlier that day in order to keep it safe and clean. I held on to this observation out of genuine curiosity.

Over the following art therapy sessions I quickly became immersed in the process of mark-making, the artistic expression of lines, dots, hatching used to make drawings, either in the therapy room or at home, totally exposing the underbelly of my very being and recounting, in graphic interpretation, what it truly felt like to be me.

I still have those art therapy drawings at home but I have only ever looked at them twice in the nearly three years years since making them. I never had an opportunity to process those drawings with the same art therapist that encouraged them. Sally Mungall abandoned me before the work was completed. Those drawings are currently stowed in an oversized envelope moldering like radioactive waste, the revealed trauma still unprocessed.