Frequently a target of criticism over its practitioner accreditation requirements, the BACP recently attempted to clarify its supervision hours guidelines, only to muddy the picture even further. Despite attempts to market it all as ‘quite clear’, the basic mathematics of BACP guidelines lead to some counter-intuitive conclusions.
How long does it take to complete one million words of online counselling and online therapy? If you’re Managing Editor Greg Mulhauser, it apparently takes a little less than 3 years. A few weeks ago, the total volume of counselling emails between Mulhauser and his clients surpassed one million words — apparently making Mulhauser the first online practitioner in the history of the field to document this volume of individual online therapeutic work.
Echoing the conclusions of a report from several UK mental health charities, an organisation which trains group psychotherapists has welcomed the report’s call for greater access to psychological therapies in the NHS and says that the NHS is not making full use of practising group psychotherapists.
The BBC’s Radio 4 Saturday morning reported on NHS plans for a pilot project in Staffordshire which would allow patients engaging in self-harm to continue to do so under medical supervision. With the radio interviewers seemingly intent on ferreting out whatever controversy they could discover, it seemed to me that important points were missed about the role of self-harming as a coping mechanism.
In the largest ‘real world’ trial ever conducted, a $35 million US government study has concluded that antidepressants cure (or fail to cure) the symptoms of major depression in half of all sufferers, even when individuals are receiving the best possible care. The drugs used in the study, including Celexa, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and Effexor, work in very different ways yet had roughly equal effectiveness when it came to treating depression.
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