Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
If the author disagrees, but we are satisfied that the work has been published elsewhere, is in the public domain and the complainant can fully prove it is their work, we will publish a clarification in the next available issue or as soon as possible. If the complainant can't provide this evidence, we will take no further action. The final decision will rest with BACP. Online posting by authors after publication However, not every therapist has had a negative experience. BACP registered therapist Katie Rose, who has set up a Facebook group for UK therapists working for BetterHelp to share tips, says you can make it work for you: ‘Yes, clients can message you at any time of day, but you don’t need to respond at any time of day. I respond during my normal working hours. The system does pester you if you don’t respond within 24 hours but you’re not expected to respond immediately or at the weekends,’ she says. ‘Plus, you do get paid for messaging so for me, there is an incentive to respond.’ But some therapists worry that helping a client explore all aspects of their feelings about their gender or sexuality could be misconstrued as ‘conversion therapy’. This fear is explored by Paul Mollitt in our ‘Big issue’ article on therapists’ attitudes to working with trans clients. Research into humanistic counselling has been given a major boost by the findings of two randomised controlled trials (RCTs) published earlier this year. The PRaCTICED trial, 1 which was funded by BACP and conducted at the University of Sheffield, established that person-centred experiential therapy (PCET) does achieve comparable results with CBT when delivered in an IAPT setting – as analysis of practice-based data had already indicated. The ETHOS RCT, 2 which was supported by funding from the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC) and led by a team at the University of Roehampton, found clear benefits for children receiving person-centred school-based counselling in terms of achieving their goals.
Bearing witness to dementia and holding an embodied awareness in dementia relationships is a political call – we are summoned both personally and professionally. In this last reflection on the film, Jonathan Wyatt, Director of Counselling and Psychotherapy at the School of Health in Social Science, University of Edinburgh, speaks of this kinaesthetic and affective call: Says Dr Clare Symons, BACP Head of Research: ‘Broadly for both trials, the findings remain very helpful and supportive because both underline the effectiveness of counselling and equip us with evidence that we are criticised for not having much of, by comparison with CBT. While we argue that RCTs are not the single most effective way of evidencing effectiveness, we are hampered if we can’t say we have RCTs that show this too. Our argument is that people should have a choice of effective, evidence-based therapies and are not confined to the one therapy for which there is a greater amount of RCT evidence, and we can do that now.’ Norcross and Lambert offer several ‘take-home points’ from this massive body of research: ‘One: patients contribute the lion’s share of psychotherapy success (and failure). Two: the therapeutic relationship generally accounts for at least as much psychotherapy success as the treatment method. Three: particular treatment methods do matter in some cases, especially more complex or severe cases. Four: adapting or customising therapy to the patient enhances the effectiveness of psychotherapy probably by innervating multiple pathways – the patient, the relationship, the method, and expectancy. Five: psychotherapists need to consider multiple factors and their optimal combinations, not only one or two of their favourites.’ And, they add: ‘… the patient’s perspective of the relationship proves more important to their treatment outcome than the therapist’s. The patient’s experience of the alliance, cohesion, empathy, and support relate and contribute more to their success than the practitioner’s experience.’ In other words, the client knows best when it comes to how they feel about the therapy relationship.Dementia is under scrutiny: 850,000 people in the UK are living with the illness, and one in three people aged over 65 will have dementia by the time they die. 1 This is predicted to rise to over two million by 2051. There is an urgent socio-political call for action, 2 driving up research into causes and for a cure, looking towards prevention, improving treatment and raising care standards. 1 Please include up to 50 words of biographical information including, for example, your current job title, relevant qualifications or research interests. This will be published with your article. To sum up: ‘... a pluralistic perspective of good practice that is inclusive of all modalities is essential. The therapeutic relationship is key to effective therapy, and a focus on ingredients such as collaboration, empathy, and responding to client preferences is vital to ensuring ethical and effective therapeutic practice. The recognition that different clients need different things promotes a more pluralistic provision of therapy services.’
Her aim with this book is to encourage people to recognise that they are resilient, they are able to come through such losses, by drawing on their own and others’ strengths and support. ‘The counselling profession is very much needed for people who have depression and are suicidal and so on. But for the rest of us, what we need is psychoeducation,’ Boss says. ‘I believe it’s information that will help people to cope with the natural stress that comes out of an unnatural situation. There are long waiting lists for professionals and we need to know that not the entire population needs to go into a therapy room. There aren’t enough therapists to do one-to-one therapy and nor can many people afford it, so you need to give out psychoeducational material so they can help themselves and each other.’Caltrider compares the sharing of data relating to our mental health as the equivalent of ‘putting up a sign outside your house that says, “Hey, I’m depressed, I have a drinking problem and I’m meeting with my therapist from six to seven.” We don’t put that on the outside of our house, for obvious reasons. Yet when you hand this sort of data over to a company, that becomes something they can treat as a business asset and use, share or even sell to target you online with ads.’ As is so often the case, alcohol progresses to harder substances. Drugs are a common part of the gay male scene and it is in this area that the problem most visibly manifests. In the past 20 years, the use of drugs such as cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana has evolved into far more dangerous substances, such as GHB, mephedrone and crystal meth, often in a sexual setting, which has contributed to an unseen public health crisis. The British crime survey 2013/14 showed that 33% of gay men had used illicit drugs in the previous six months, three times the rate of straight men and the highest rate of any group. 4 Over the past 10 years or so, there have been many high-profile cases of successful gay men either overdosing or taking their own lives or killing people while under the influence of drugs. These are extreme cases but not as uncommon as they should be. The recent turn towards re-defining ‘affect’ describes it as a process of embodied meaning making. 3 A crucial aspect of embodied meaning making involves how we quite literally ‘make sense’. Kinesthesia can be defined as ‘the sense of movement’ and is informed by all the senses, as well as internal sensations of muscle tension and body position. Also, we know, through research in the fields of cultural studies and neuroscience, that all the senses interrelate. 4 Here Julia Burton-Jones, a professional dementia educator and carer who works for the social enterprise Dementia Pathfinders, reflects on her kinaesthetic response when watching the film and how the moving body can be seen as a vehicle for kinaesthetically-mediated empathic responses.
The key mechanism in people’s recovery is the exchange of stories. People can’t make sense of the death – because they weren’t there, they had to rely on reports from healthcare staff, they’ve been denied the eulogies and conversations after the funeral – it’s delayed grief and, as the research has found, people aren’t recovering. But we have been monitoring participants in our Zoom groups that we’ve also been running, using an Assimilation of Grief Experiences Scale that we developed to measure how well participants are beginning to accommodate their loss into their lives, and it’s clear that, even when the rest of their lives are still difficult, and they may be struggling with their anxiety and depression as shown on the PHQ and GAD scales, their relationship with the deceased and making sense of the death steadily improve. We are seeing changes and adaptation in the people in our groups.’ There is a generation of gay men still alive today who were criminalised and imprisoned. Being gay is still illegal in 70 countries and subject to the death penalty in around 11, and thousands of gay people still come to London from across the world for sanctuary. Even in the UK, it’s only in the past 20 years that legal inequalities have begun to significantly improve. And while we can eliminate laws, the shame and trauma inflicted on people over generations are not so easy to erase. Although young people today are growing up in a very different world to that experienced by previous generations, it is still hard to be different. The aim of the refresh is to align Therapy Today more closely with BACP’s activities and your concerns and priorities. We want to ensure the magazine plays its part in keeping you up to date with what your Association is doing on your behalf and what you are doing on behalf of your profession. How would it be to share your notes with clients? Anthony Prendergast decided to find out. Regulars The structure of your article should be logical and obvious – ideally with a beginning, a middle and an end. The introduction will often include a rationale or overview, the middle is where you develop your arguments and ideas, and the ending summarises or concludes.As soon as you go to scale, there’s this inverse thing that happens in that you automatically have a reduction in how closely you can oversee what’s happening. Some say that providing something is better than nothing, but I’m not entirely sure that’s true because there can be bad practice and people can get into trouble. I’m not commenting on any specific services, but in our experience, the more we grew, the less able we were to spend time getting to know our clinicians. In the end, we didn’t feel confident scaling a service that is fundamentally a very sensitive and intimate affair. Speaking just from our experience, I’d say that we were therapists first, having a go at innovation, and in the tech sense we didn’t really succeed. On the other hand, there are those who are great at innovation but know little about therapy – ideally mental health innovations should be arrived at in close conversation between both.’ Where now? In his final column, John McLeod shares his hopes for the future of research in counselling and psychotherapy Please note, we don't review self-published books in our journals. Permissions and confirmations Client confidentiality
Great Deal 
New Comment