The National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society (NCPS) has launched a campaign calling on the government to guarantee choice of therapist in NHS mental health support, warning that people who don't respond to NHS Talking Therapies currently have nowhere else to turn unless they can pay for therapy privately.
The campaign, ‘Lost for Words’, comes ahead of the government's Mental Health Strategy for England, due to be published this autumn.
NHS Talking Therapies is the main mental health service available through GPs in England, and for many people it works well. But NCPS analysis shows the scale of the gap for those it doesn't reach:
Of the 1.8 million referrals made every year, only 19% result in reliable recovery.
Just 37% of people referred complete a full course of treatment, meaning 63% drop out before finishing.
Even among those who do complete treatment, only 50.5% reliably recover (hovering around or under this figure year-on-year).
Meg Moss, Head of Public Affairs and Advocacy at NCPS said: "Getting therapy that works shouldn't depend on your ability to pay for it. There are more than 75,000 trained, accredited counsellors and psychotherapists working in the UK right now. The question isn't whether the support exists. The question is who gets access to it."
Dr Djalil Baiou, GP, Trentside Medical Group “While NHS Talking Therapies provides an important service, having access to an in-house counselling service gives patients an additional and genuinely different therapeutic option. In particular, the counselling approach provides an alternative to the predominantly CBT-based interventions that patients may have previously experienced or that may not suit their individual needs or preferences. We regularly see patients for whom a less structured, more exploratory form of talking therapy is valuable, and having greater choice allows psychological support to be better tailored to the individual rather than relying on a single therapeutic model”.
Source: The National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society
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