NICE Looking at Counselling and Depression
The National Institute of Clinical Excellence is currently conducting a consultation as to the effectiveness of using counselling with depression. The three lead bodies, the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and the British Psychoanalytic Council have all generally welcomed the guidelines. However, as per usual, there is a real concern as to the necessity of being heavily reliant on the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy model.
My personal concern is that the modalities looked at are the usual suspects, despite the fact that there are many peer reviewed studies which show the effectiveness of hypnosis when conjoined with psychotherapy in the treatment of depression. This lack of recognition from NICE can genuinely be a bone of contention with the modality and we should as a profession be doing more the promote the psychotherapeutic values of using hypnosis within a broad integrative psychotherapeutic model.
Hypno-Psychotherapy has come a long way, but we still have a long way to go when it comes to parity of recognition with our psychodynamic, cognitive behavioural and integrative colleagues. The profession needs to promote what we do in a main stream way and avoid the nonsensical means of promotions that some of our colleagues use.
