Netherlands love Mentalizing

Great conference at the end of last week in lovely Haarlem, outside Amsterdam, hosted by the newly launched MBT Netherlands organsation.

The conference was in the most beautiful concert hall venue; two stages, one radically modern, all swirling wood galleries, curving so they gave you the feeling of being inside a whale (but in a nice way.) The other was strict and classical with huge windows that poured in light and framed the medieval market place below - felt very honoured to be there.

AMBIT got a very positive welcome, for which I am most grateful, and the notion of TiddlyManuals seemed to interest people. The day afterwards a group of MBT treatment developers met to think specifically about MBT and Adolescence. What was so encouraging was the strong sense that two parallel processes were occurring.

First, there was increasing clarity and confidence that there is a shared common core of what underpins mentalizing therapies... that is both respectful of other branches of therapeutic endeavour, but also quite distinctive.

Second, there is a rich variety of implementations and variants, that seems entirely in keeping with the fact that Mentalizing is above all an imaginative activity, that must respond contingently to its setting if it is to be "what it says on the tin". So there are settings where MBT is using groups and individual work, and settings where it is using Family and Individual work, and settings where it is using all three. In Geneva (with Martin Debbane and colleagues) it works with youth mandated into treatment by courts, in London (Trudie Rossouw and colleagues) it has been deployed in CAMHS outpatient clinics and a "tier 4" specialist in-patient unit. AMBIT is just another (though even more heavily adapted, and actively adapting) variant in this sense...

What comes out of this (at least in my mind, and others seem interested in ways that may simply reflect their kind and polite manner in keeping with their mentalizing excellence, but I dare to hope is more!) is the goodness of fit with a Tiddlymanuals-type approach to the manualization of such an approach. Tiddlymanuals and their "amoeba-like" capacity to include content from multiple other wikis allow layers of core manual ("what is mentalizing, how it arises, the neuroscience, and how we translate all that into a basic mentalizing stance") along with sort "epi-" or "meta-manualizations" of the kinds of local tweaks, adjustments, responses and delivery systems that fit this to the specifics of a local social ecology... so all roads lead to tiddlyspace, tiddlywiki and the use of co-constructed wiki manuals n'est ce que pas?!