What often gets mentioned in articles, throughout the years, is that Jimmy is a qualified Psychotherapist. What does that mean?

In the UK a Psychotherapist is someone trained to help people with addiction, eating disorders, relationship problems, anxiety, bereavement, trauma and depression. They use talking therapies and may recommend techniques such as CBT, IPT etc. (see here).

Looking at Jimmy’s early interviews it would seem that he was searching for some purpose, in the years after leaving Cambridge, and at one point developed an interest in Psycotherapy.

So, where did this “3 years of training” fit into his life?

He would have been 22 when he graduated in 1994 (see in Bio) and his first gig (at the Tut ‘n’ Shive – here) was December 1998.

Please note that, in some of the interviews linked below, Jimmy says his first gig was in 1999 (as in this 2008 Independent interview). I’m sure he never expected a muppet like me to be data mining his career and fact checking on the date – but (as mentioned in the Tut ‘n’ Shive post) he had been nominated for an award in August 1999, meaning his first gig had to have been 1998. I’ve spent a lot of time combing newspaper articles and message board threads…

To try and tighten this timeframe down more:

He had got a job at Shell, in marketing, and said in this 2005 Independent interview that the first 3 months of his fledgling comedy career overlapped with working at Shell. And, in this 2006 Guardian interview, he’d said he had been at Shell for a “couple of not very happy years”.

These 2 statements fit with my guesstimate of December 1998 for first gig and early 1999 for taking redundancy from Shell.

This 2005 Independent interview confuses things a bit as it says “Carr quit the oil firm and spent three years training as a psychotherapist”. Which makes it sound like he spent 2 years at Shell and THEN 3 in further education.

Was there time for that? Was he in part time education or were the 3 / 2 year periods slightly less than 3 / 2? It’s all a bit vague, so I’ll keep digging.

I think this 2002 Sunday Times piece (behind a paywall) could be more accurate when it orders events as (1) he spent 3 years training as a Psychotherapist (2) comedy edged into his life and then (3) it says “…after finally deciding to quit his job”…

Still hard to tell.

In that Sunday Times interview he said:

“I’m able to stop people smoking or deal with phobias. I can give life-management coaching, things like that. The main reason I didn’t pursue it as a career was that I felt I needed to gain more experience of life first.”

The Times piece also explains that he had signed up for a hippy-ish spiritual retreat in Greece that required that the participants address the group each morning. He liked that part and another attendee said he should become a comedian… The date for the retreat isn’t mentioned, btw.

To build on that suggestion of trying to be a comedian – events in his life also pushed him into NLP.

His mother, Nora, died of Pancreatitis in 2001 after a long illness and, leading up to that timeframe, Jimmy had been living at home and being a pseudo parent to his younger brother (Patrick) 14 years younger than him. He’d also lost his faith, which had been a huge part of his Catholic family upbringing (he’d wanted to be a priest at one time) and this all added to his restlessness and search for purpose.

In this 2012 interview with The Times he said he didn’t want to do psychoanalysis (to help with his issues) but found NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) helped him realise that what he wanted was to be a comedian. As mentioned in the piece – he’d said a fundamental question, in NLP, is “What do you want?”.

My take from all of that is…

• It seems like he was qualified to a level where he could have applied to be a Psychotherapist
• He’s trained on or researched a LOT of different mental health therapies (are some of his intelligent and insightful responses to heckles making sense now?).
• IMHO…Psychotherapy’s loss is our gain!