I used to love the time I spent visiting Clouds House between 2005 – 2007 when I was acting as External Examiner for their two-year Foundation degree in Addiction Counselling, which was developed and run by Tim Leighton, and linked to Bath University. I spent a great deal of time talking about the field with Tim, one of the most knowledgeable and inspiring people I have met in the field.
Tim introduced me to the amazing writings of William (Bill) L. White, the leading addiction recovery advocate in the US. On 18 March 2009, Tim and I both spoke at a conference in London organised by Action on Addiction and my grassroots initiative Wired In, with the main speaker being Bill White. Addiction recovery advocates from around the UK were invited to the conference, which was a great success.
In this film clip, describes his 36-year career working in the addiction recovery field. In my humble opinion, Tim’s career is very impressive.
A 36-Year Journey [10’14”]
In 1985, Tim was offered a trainee counsellor position at Clouds House, a residential treatment centre in East Knoyle, Wilshire, which began his extraordinary 36-year working experience at Clouds. He became very interested in group therapy; nobody was really trained in this therapy at the time.
Tim was sent to America to see how they trained counsellors over there, which was very valuable learning, but he was always sensitive to the cultural differences between the States and Europe. His experiences there helped him to develop and start teaching a course at Clouds in the late 1980s which eventually became a Foundation Degree course in Addictions Counselling, run in partnership with Bath University.
Around 1990, Tim met Dr Tony Ryle, one of the most remarkable people that he has ever met. Tony invited him to join a group of people who were helping to develop Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT). Tim started spending a day a week at St Thomas’s Hospital in London where Tony was offering supervised practice in the NHS psychotherapy service he was leading there.
Tim likes the fact that CAT is one of the very few psychotherapies that takes the political situation of people seriously. It takes into account the socio-political factors that impact on people’s mental health and wellbeing. Tim emphasises that a lot of other psychotherapy models are highly individualistic and assume a middle-class stability.
He says he was always concerned that there was an inequality of resource for people in the UK for mental health and addiction issues. It’s like what Welsh GP and researcher Julian Tudor-Hart calls the inverse-care law—‘in that medical and other resources are provided in inverse relation to the needs. People who don’t need it get a lot, and people who do need it don’t get very much.’ Tim says that Julian Tudor-Hart’s ideas were also a huge influence on him.
Tim worked for Clouds (which became Action of Addiction in 2007) until 2021, when the latter merged with The Forward Trust. Tim took redundancy at this time and is now self-employed.