Tag: IAPT and long term conditions

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Talking Therapies Institutionalised Psychologising of Physical Health Problems

 

As a high intensity therapist working in IAPT, I’m finding an increasing amount of the people I see have chronic physical health conditions.  The training and supervision I receive emphasises my role as one of treating the depression/anxiety associated with these conditions, and not the condition itself.  This sounds plausible in theory, but my experience it just doesn’t work that way in practice. 
 
 
 
  1. Firstly, I get the distinct feeling that a lot of the time the people I see with chronic health conditions are not clinically anxious or depressed, they are just having a normal reaction to a really challenging situation.
  2. Secondly it is impossible for someone with my training and limited medical knowledge to know whether a symptom such as fatigue or poor sleep is down to anxiety or depression or other factors, including physical causes.
  3. I’m quite sure that I have treated people in the past, and will do so again, where symptoms arising entirely from an undiagnosed physical condition were misinterpreted as a mental health issue and I worry that there is a real danger, even with the best of intentions, of gaslighting people here, however sensitive and non pathologising I try to be. 
  4. Time and again I have had people tell me their symptoms were dismissed for years as being “all in their head”, and I worry I am inadvertently feeding into that damaging narrative. 
  5. Greater integration between physical and mental health care in the NHS can only be a good thing, but my experience is there is sizeable gap between the theory and practice on the ground.  IAPT is meant to be integrating more into physical health teams, in practice I am not sure how well this is really happening. 
  6. I know how hard staff on the ground in IAPT work and how dedicated the clinicians are, I worry we are being put in an impossible situation.  I’m very grateful to CBT watch for highlighting some of the predicaments that I can relate to in my day to day work.  

 

Identity withheld to protect the IAPT therapist

Dr Mike Scott

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IAPT’s Black Hole – Accountability

I recently asked the National Audit Office to restart it’s investigation into IAPT. I am expecting their reply in the next week or two. There has been no independent scrutiny of IAPT. They have been answerable only to Clinical Commissioning Groups, which have consisted largely of GPs and allowed IAPT to mark its’ own homework.

But the accountability gap also extends downwards, where is the evidence that front line staff or clients have been consulted or involved in decision making?  Most recently IAPT has offered webinars, for its staff on helping those with long term COVID.   There is a tacit assumption that this will be within the expertise of IAPT therapists just as helping those with long term physical conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome. But the IAPT staff working with LTCs were never consulted, before this new foray. Client’s with LTCs were never asked whether they were back to their old selves (or best functioning) before this proposed further extension of IAPT’s empire.  

In the forthcoming issue of the British Journal of Clinical Psychology I have challenged IAPT’s account of its ‘performance’ see ‘Ensuring IAPT Does What It Says On The Tin’ https://doi.org/10.1111/bjc.12264. There is a reply in rebuttal see ‘The costs and benefits of practice-based evidence: correcting some misunderstandings about the 10-year meta-analysis of IAPT studies’ https://doi.org/10.1111/bjc.12268 that reveals a breathtaking level of conflict of interests. IAPT and its’ fellow travellers should be held to account. But importantly they also need to account to their therapists and clients. [ The original IAPT paper is available at https://doi.org/10.1111/bjc.12259]

 

Dr Mike Scott