Dr. David Murphy:

On the range of therapies currently available in the National Health Service in England, all the therapies which are promoted and supported by the improving access to psychological therapies programme are evidence-based therapies. It is mostly taken up by cognitive behavioural therapies. Counselling for depression is the second most accessed of the evidence-based therapies. There are others which are practised on a much smaller scale. On the question about families, there is behavioural couples therapy for depression which is seen to be an effective approach.

On counselling more generally, in the English NHS system, there are many qualified counsellors but few who have been trained in the specific evidence-based approaches. This is something that is subject to a programme of change and I have also spoken to the IACP about it. Many counsellors working in the health service have not had the specific training to deliver one of these evidence-based approaches. We feel is very important to ensure that if this is an opportunity to change accessibility to talking therapies here, that the evidence-based therapies are at the forefront of becoming available.

General practitioners arrive at an important way of thinking about people's experiences. Talking therapies and person-centred experiential counselling for depression approach adopt a very different way of understanding patients' distress than our medical colleagues, hence the difference or tension between a talk therapy or a medical response, that is, medication. The division of clinical psychology in the British Psychological Society has just released a very far-ranging document, The Power Threat Meaning Framework, which is entirely about a different way of thinking about distress which does not require the idea of diagnosis or the medicalising of people and is very much consistent with the ideas of a person-centred humanistic approach.