Dealing with sex
Sir: Everything John Rowan Wilson says in his column about sex (May 19) is true except for his reference to our magazine. Sexual counselling and therapy do indeed remain "one of the I most backward branches of medicine at the moment" but may I make three additional points about the worth of " a letter to the editor of Forum magazine "?
1) In some 40 per cent of cases, that letter to Forum is the beginning of a correspondence which takes its author to our own Forum Adviser clinic at the nominal charge of a pound for an hour's counselling or a series of sessions with just the sort of therapists John Rowan Wilson commends: doctors "experienced in this kind of work." Our counsellors — who also work for nominal sums — include: two psychiatrists, one urologist, three GPs, one social worker, one Freudian analyst, one clinical psychologist, one social therapist plus a Reichian therapist. Their collective qualifications and experience comprise many years' service under the NHS; training at most of the London teaching hospitals and in one case at the Sexual Research Centre, John Hopkins University, Bal timore. It would not be an exaggeration to describe the Forum clinic as the only comprehensive, psycho-sexual advice service available to the
i ordinary public in England. Further, the Forum clinic has precisely that constitution which John Rowan Wilson says he admires in his article and laments is substantively . . "few and far between."
2) Some 20 per cent of the letters we receive are sent to individual consultants for reply and then published in our advice columns, These consultants include: three psychiatrists, two gynaecologists, one woman GP/obstetrician, two psycho-sexual counsellors, one clinical psychologist, one GP retired family doctor of 30 years' experience and two consultant venereologists. Their collective qualifications run from Guy's to Bart's and in one case an additional spell of research work with Masters and Johnson in the States. The purpose of publishing this section of letters is selfevident.
3) 4 further 20 per cent of letters is published without comment. The purpose here is twofold. Firstly, like Booth, we turn nobody away: our correspondents may write to us without fear of conventional censure. (And our aim here is also partly a propaganda job on behalf of guilt-free sexuality in which we believe.) Secondly, people may employ almost any rationalisation before they can conceptualise a problem as sexual and confront it. To help them, we regularly print what amount to vernacular accounts of standard sexual disorders and desires. The taboo surrounding the articulation or conceptualisation of a sexual problem is still so strong that finding, for example, a letter which shows that somebody else is "going through It" or has "been through it all before," quite often amounts to a therapy in itself. "4) The remaining 20 per cent of our letters request specific pieces of information such as the -" reason for , the absence of FPA offices in Devon
and Cornwall," or the " address of the , best VD centre in Sheffield " — which we are quite happy to supply — and as such remain unpublished.
Phillip Hodson
Executive Editor. Forum, 2 Bramber Road, London W14.
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