Two people having lunch without smartphones.

Instead of  CBT sessions, the local mental health team are just playing Reasons to Be Cheerful: Part 3, over and over again. The cuts are beginning to bite.

Whenever I hear this song, the dark side of my mind sings an alternative version called Reasons to be Gloomy. (Earthquake in Turkey, Murder in Hackney, KFC…). Actually sad songs are much more uplifting, e.g. Girlfriend In a Coma. I know, I know, its serious.

A kind of Quantitative Easing has increased the supply of words, above and beyond demand for them. With QE, money goes into the economy, but where does it come out? I suspect the answer is HSBC, either that or Poundland in Mexborough.

Something similar is happening with words. Far more of them are being written or spoken, recorded and published. What will be the effect? In the words of John Major, they are probably coming out as ‘froth and bubble’. My argument is that the surplus words are emerging in the form of Chat. There are some obvious examples, like the Chat Show and reality television. Smartphone sales are through the roof. The new media has turned people who were already chatty into right-old-turbo-gobs.

Mostly the message from mental health experts – and BT – has been that it is good to talk. Communication, communication and communication, as Tony Blair didn’t say. But what about the quality? Is everyone, everywhere, just talking too much? Words are everywhere, spoken and written. Metro. Evening Standard. You can’t sell them and you can’t even give them away. People are carrying words round in wheelbarrows. Words are the new hyperinflation. Words are the new carbon footprint. Wordiness is the new Obesity. When word inflation occurs, language loses its meaning and no-one can really say anything properly.

Until finally Ronan Keating says it best when he says nothing at all.

Is verbiage damaging to psychotherapy? If either the client or the therapist seem to be making small talk, we are taught that something has gone wrong. What I look for when people speak is the signal to noise ratio. Certain groups of people use a lot of words where one or two choice words would be enough. I’m thinking priests and politicians. Or Alan Carr, the famous Chatty Man.

The practice nurse went a bit chatty at my recent annual health check. She had much worse health problems than I did. But that’s not the point, is it? That’s something for her and her own health-check-with-the-nurse. Chatty therapists tend to make the mistake of ‘early disclosure’. This is when the therapist gives away a few personal details to get things going. No doubt this is an attempt to break the ice and appear genuine and empathic. Unfortunately another person’s experiences are never that similar to your own, and even if they are, their take on them is different from yours. Even if they have the same take on them, you were there first. It’s a difficult trade off between Empathy and Genuineness, and no-one quite gets it right. In the worse case scenario the therapist will have disclosed his forthcoming trial for manslaughter before the patient has even got his coat off.

OK, the health check revealed that my back is not that bad, compared to yours. I found this out for certain at B and Q when I played my Sick Role Card to request one of the staff to carry some massive bags of compost to the car. As the very obliging man – an early discloser it turned out – struggled with them, he began to tell me about his own back problems, the account growing increasingly horrendous as he shouldered the bags from the giant pile. He’d had several operations and long courses of Physio, dallied with the alternative sector, TENS, hot yoga etc. Sometimes his legs went numb and tingly. In this case he should have disclosed even earlier, and I would have carried the bags myself and counted myself lucky to do so. I’d have taken over his shift if he’d let me. It looks as though B and Q have taken the rule book on disability and turned it inside-out.

Some people are deluded that  the new Iphone collects all our fingerprints and stores them somewhere. Come to think of it, that’s not a delusion, its probably true. It probably knows where you went shopping and what salad dressing you chose. So what?  Finding any serious information in a sea of chatter must be nearly impossible. I feel sorry for the intelligence services trying to look through all this flotsam. A paranoid person perhaps supposes that some kind of task force is working night and day on every aspect of his life, sifting the bins and joining the shredded documents together with hired jigsaw experts. Almost disappointingly, there is no-one out there doing jigsaws with your Santander statement.

No doubt there is an evolutionary advantage offered by garnering, manipulating and disseminating information. Supposedly Tesco made money using the market research that came implicit with their Clubcard scheme. That seems quite a way from spying on people.  They are searching for wood but can see only trees.

Most people’s response to surveillance is that they don’t care. They are not bothered that Barack Obama knows which biscuits they bought. Preferably though he should not get to know that they bought The Ultimate Eighties Power Ballads CD. Barack, it was only £3, please don’t get all superior. Don’t forget you mixed George Osborne up with Jeff Osborne.

Instead of buying a car, I like to ‘build the car’ on the manufacturers websites. Usually the software is clunky, or there is something wrong with Quicktime or Flash, so the virtual car gets abandoned somewhere between the Milano Leather and Heated Support Tights options. Nevertheless, all the carmakers know, or think they know, what car I would specify if I had a better computer or attention span and some money. Is it realistic to think they care, or is such a notion mere grandiosity on my part? Do I expect them to ring any moment from Stuttgart – yes we now have the S class in purple, like you always wanted, should we send it round?

Is there some kind of representation of Me out there in cyberspace, based on my failed online build-a-car projects and grocery purchases? If so it’s hardly a finely sketched personality profile, unless Rorschach testing has moved on a long way. The truth is there is very little use in collecting masses of trivia, whether you are a therapist, a supermarket, or the NSA. Lots of noise, hardly any signal. Experts call it the Alan Carr effect.

In this cacophony of trivial information, there are islands of confidentiality, such as Confession and Psychotherapy. But do any of us really have much that is worth being confidential about? They have heard it all before. People have been plotting revolutions, visiting sex workers and buying Keane albums since history began.

Being a bit of an introvert, I’m wary of the Chatty Person. I know colleagues who never reveal they are psychiatrists to people they meet on a train or plane, to the extent of building an alter ego. It’s difficult for Psychiatrists to build a credible cover story, since they seldom have any experience of other careers. I knew someone who pretended to be a hospital manager, thinking they would know just enough to get by, only to be floored by a question about Lean Sigma or some such jargon, by a busybody from KPMG.

I try to avoid taxis and hairdressers, where the chat can be relentless and searching. Never make the mistake of thinking your hairdresser is not listening to your story, or won’t remember it in detail. Trivial information is hard currency in the world of Chat. Hairdressers are not bound by any rule of confidentiality and will not be struck off any register for talking out of turn. Quite the contrary. Why don’t the security services simply use hairdressers as spies? They’ll get the info one way or another – hot tongs if necessary.

Campaigning for greater secrecy seems ridiculous. Campaigning for Plain English has already been done. Campaigning for real psychotherapy is probably too late, now that Reasons to be Cheerful seems similarly effective. What we need is better editing. This piece, for instance, its much too long.

I once worked for a consultant who never allowed anything to go out that took up more than one side of A4.  And that was even before the invention of bullet points. Along these lines, instead of all the above nonsense, let me summarize as follows:

• A high signal to noise ratio is vital in effective communication.
• Barack Obama knows you like James Blunt.
• Tesco use jigsaw experts to read your mind.
• Beware the chatty therapist.
• Wanted for B and Q: strong silent type.