Can AI help me reduce dropout?
AI divides opinion, doesn’t it? Recently, I decided to overcome my entirely unfounded prejudices against it and put Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard AI platforms through their paces. Could they suggest three ways, I asked them, based on research, in which I could reduce dropout? Turns out they know their stuff – their three…
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The principles that connect us all
However much we might think our therapy model is uniquely different from other modalities, it would appear that there are some therapeutic strategies that we all share. In that sense, they are truly transtheoretical. Are these the principles that connect us all as therapists? Consensus across the modalities of therapy? “My fantasy is that one…
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The Future of Therapy
Remember 2012? A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, but who would have predicted some of the events that have taken place in the intervening years? Who would have predicted the 2012 Olympic Games would have been a stunning success that brought people in the UK, albeit briefly, closer together? Who…
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Is CBT losing its shine?
The 2021 – 22 IAPT Annual Report delivered an unexpected surprise. Set against other therapy modalities, and its own past performance, the recovery rate for CBT has deteriorated significantly in the past year. Here, we showcase the data and speculate on what might lie behind this drop in performance. I have to confess I don’t…
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When ideology meets reality
What do the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng and the founding principles of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Programme (IAPT) have in common? Answer: A hopeful start, after which both have failed to survive contact with reality. The difference? One has had a vanishingly short half-life, while the other, despite recovery rates falling…
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Glimpses behind the therapy room door…
Doing effective therapy is hard enough on its own. Integrating measures of outcome into the process adds additional complexity. Do it well, and the purpose, meaning and value of using measures is integrated into conversations. Do it poorly, and we hear the crunch of gears and a trail of potential alliance fractures. As this recent…
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What actually makes therapy work?
Meet Jordan Harris, a counselor based in the US. Our previous blog was the result of an invite from Jordan to contribute to his website. Here, we return the complement and make space for a perspective from Jordan, who shares (as part of a blog series) how his approach to alliance building helps him to…
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Are You Any Good…as a Therapist?
It’s a provocative question, isn’t it? It’s also the title of a recent blog post, more of which below. Looking back at my outcomes over 25 years, the answer depends on what period I’m looking at. I know that when I’ve got complacent, or stopped looking at my data, it’s shown in my outcomes. So,…
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Learning to read data like you read sessions … (just read the book!)
In their new book Outcome Measures and Evaluation in Counselling and Psychotherapy, authors Chris Evans and Jo-anne Carlyle have pulled off a rare feat. In making some important statistical concepts accessible, presenting ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments for measurement in a balanced way, and leading the reader through a range of implementation scenarios, they have written the…
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Can benchmarks improve IAPT performance?
It doesn’t take much digging into national IAPT 2020 – 21 data to discover big differences between service provision in different areas. In the last blog we highlighted (against a national recovery rate of 51%) the performance of Brighton and Hove (34%) and Stoke on Trent (64%) NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) . In this…
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