The annual NOTA (National Organisation for the Treatment of Abusers) Scotland conference took place on 18-19 April 2016 at Stirling University. The subject was Preventing Sexual Abuse: working effectively with adults, adolescents and children. For the second year, The Reward Foundation gave a workshop on Internet Pornography and the Adolescent Brain. The focus of our presentation this year was how people can escalate from watching legal pornography to illegal material as a result of the brain changes that compulsive use can cause and the consequences thereof in terms of mental and physical health, relationship risks and criminality.
There were two main highlights of the event. First was meeting 5 young male sex offenders who are going through a 2-year residential programme at Glebe House in Cambridgeshire. Glebe House is a treatment centre run on core Quaker principles of equality, truth, peace and simplicity and uses a therapeutic model of democracy, communalism, reality confrontation and tolerance. They spoke about how their in-depth and humane treatment had helped them overcome their severe social problems and train for work and life in the community.
The second highlight was the talk by Dr. Lucy Johnstone, consultant clinical psychologist and hearing about the revolution in the approach to diagnosis in mental health. She is author of A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Diagnosis. She sets out a more efficient and caring approach to ‘psychological formulation’, part of the core training of any clinical psychologist. Labels stigmatize people. It is better to ask ‘what happened to you?’ rather than ‘what is wrong with you?’
