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Up to one third of patients referred for psychotherapy fail to attend for their first appointment (O'Loughlin, 1990). Psychotherapy assessments are usually allocated a considerable portion of uninterrupted time, and an unexpected non-attendance wastes significant clinical resources. A variety of strategies have been used to ensure that assessors are not left waiting for a patient who never comes. One method is to send out forms which must be completed and returned before a first appointment date is given. In O'Loughlin's study, in which a similar questionnaire to that detailed in this paper was used, it was suggested that sending a pre-appointment questionnaire reduced the default rate.

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Cognitive linguistics is a new development in one of the basic sciences of psychiatry. It takes a novel approach to metaphor that is having an impact on philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, offering a perspective on questions about the development of language and the embodiment of mind that may have an impact on psychiatry. Likewise, our expertise in mental pathology may be required for further development in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff, 1997).

The linguistic concept‘metaphor’ has an established place in clinical as well as theoretical psychotherapy. It has been seen as analogous to or even fundamental to the analytic concept of transference. Metaphors have been thought to have a special role in enhancing therapist‐patient communications. By contrast, in linguistics itself, metaphor has been relatively neglected, viewed as irrelevant and unscientific. That conventional approach to metaphor has recently been challenged by Contemporary Metaphor Theory. This new theory suggests that language depends upon a largely unconscious system of conventional metaphor. Our bodily experiences are the basis of our understanding of abstract concepts such as emotions and relationships. Novel and imaginative metaphors build upon this fundamental biological structure. The traditional approach placed metaphor, along with rhetoric and, by inference, psychodynamic thinking, at the periphery of science. Cognitive linguistic research is now showing that language is fundamentally structured by metaphorical processes, which enhances the scientific status of psychoanalysis and supports and extends the view of metaphor as at the heart of language and meaning.