Hi Melvin, yes I appreciate and understand that. It is a tough situation, therapists need to earn a living to be able to offer their services at all. And I think the NHS is really stretched enough as it is at the moment.
Thanks for taking the time to comment and share your thoughts, best wishes to you, Adam.

As Adam has said in his article some people cannot afford pruvate therapy. This is even more so now when we are in the midst of a pandemic when many more people are struggling simply to put food on the table and may indeed have to resort to food banks! However good having private therapy may or may not be it cannot of course be of the slightest use to someone who cannot afford it! Even in the best of economic times private therapy is not cheap – and I don’t say it should be – and this has the inevitable effect of excluding large numbers of people from accessing it to start with – this is a major drawback of private therapy!

Dave,

I’d like to thank you enormously for taking the time to write and share as you have done here. I really appreciate what you have written and hope it is read by many others.

My very best wishes to you,

Adam.

I work in the NHS as a Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist who employs hypnotherapy within this process. I also see a significant number of individuals who claim to have had previous CBT and that it did not help. A couple of important issues come to mind. Firstly, much of the psychotherapy we now call CBT is offered through IAPT services who have constraints of time, budget and experience. CB Therapists are trained at different levels, and the majority of IAPT workers are trained at a lower level and are therefore expected to follow protocol based therapy and are limited to session number and duration. Even those trained at a higher level tell me that the pressure to complete work with each client is ever present.
Clients have complained that an average 30 minute session can be mostly taken up by form filling, with very little active treatment taking place.

Fortunately this is not the case in all of the NHS. I am privileged to be working in a department where needs are met according to a thorough assessment of the problem, and I have the flexibility to employ a more eclectic range of approaches, allowing me to strive for better outcomes with my clients.

I do agree though, that the development of such a role has been an uphill struggle at times, mainly due to to the need for empirical support, not just for hypnotherapy, but also when working with certain disorder types.

I certainly would like to see the tide turn over the next few years but suspect that, with budget cuts and redundancies, the opposite may occur.

Thanks Matt, you are right, it is a shame. Most of the responses I’ve been getting from this are of shock at the prevalence and saying as you have that it is a shame – the NHS is such a beloved organisation to so many.

Always awesome hearing from you Daddy Davies, best wishes to you, Adam.

I know of 2 people who work in the IAPT services, both of whom claim the stress of hitting targets and getting people out of the door has a profound effect on them mentally and on their therapy goals.

I once looked into doing my training and qualifying with the NHS but was advised by those who had done it and worked in the services that it may be best to steer clear. It’s quite sad really.

What’s even more sad is for those clients that don’t benefit from the NHS IAPT services it then creates a bit of a stigma regarding CBT which can have a knock on effect on any therapy with us when we tell them we are Cogntive Behavioural Hypnotherapists!!