Psychotherapy patients in Britain’s National Health Service say the care they receive often feels standardized, even interchangeable, rather than responsive to who they are.
A new qualitative study of National Health Service psychotherapy finds that many patients want treatment to fit them, not the other way around. The researchers asked 148 adults who had received NHS psychotherapy to describe what felt helpful, what did not, and how treatment might be improved.
According to the results, published in Psychotherapy Research, patients emphasized the value of therapy that is personal and flexible, that builds a strong relationship with the therapist, and that digs beneath surface symptoms to underlying causes. They criticized approaches that felt generic, manualized, or rushed. Others highlighted the importance of learning concrete skills and gaining agency, while warning that one-size-fits-all care risks leaving people unheard.
As the authors summarize, the analysis highlighted “the patient’s preference for personalized treatment, the importance of therapeutic alliance, [and] the demand for depth in therapy,” with patients urging “more tailored approaches and stronger therapist-patient relationships.”
The study was led by Emily Li of Yale University, together with David Kealy of the University of British Columbia, Karin Aafjes-van Doorn of Yeshiva University, Jason McCollum and John Curtis of University College London, Xiaolu Luo of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and George Silberschatz of the University of California, San Francisco.
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Depth focused therapies are inamical to public financing. Public therapy exists to reduce symptom burden at a population level, not personal discovery or exploration.
There are also bad manualized therapists who don’t understand that personalizing treatment is likely part of the manual and the kind of treatment given that demonstrated effectiveness to choose these treatments for public use in the first place.
Wanting to be understood and in relationship is just not something public healthcare is good at providing. And wanting it also doesn’t mean that getting it helps show improvement in outcomes that allow public healthcare to be funded in the first place.
Again therapy. Pick a lane. If wanting to be seen as healthcare worthwhile of public financing, the outcomes of treatments are health related and require use of faux diagnostics of invalid constructs and experiments that show marginal improvement in limited symptom domains. If you think therapy is about building a relationship and self discovery, you have to make auch better case about hey health systems should fund your practice, as it is not healthcare (I guess you would have to show self discovery improves health/wellness meaningfully to even make the attempt).
If you conceive Psychotherapy as a treatment, it has to be a treatments for some illness. If it is not a treatmnent, why are healthcare providers and health administrators and national health systems involved with it?
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Very well said!
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lol – the Uk talking therapies service is a beaurocratic nonsense.
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