The November 2025 issue of the Psychologist proclaims ‘If the NHS is to thrive over the next decade, psychology must be at its heart’. It is taken as axiomatic that psychology has a demonstrated preventative role, with a therefore assured role with the young. I might be missing something, but I could find no solid evidence base of the power of a ‘dose of prevention’. At the ‘coal-face’ I meet mental health staff bewildered at the complexity of helping needy school children. Whether to focus on the child, family or some subset and the problems of engagement. The problems are no less vexed than when I was a social worker in the 1980’s!
Psychological wares are marketed not only for their prevention properties but also apparently for their potent intervention properties. There is some truth in the latter assertion if one points to the NICE randomised controlled trials (rcts)) for depression and the anxiety disorders. But what is meted out in routine psychological therapy bears little comparison with the protocols used in the rcts. NHS Talking Therapies has never bothered to assess the treatment integrity of the alleged CBT that it provides. My own study, Scott (2018) of 90 clients going through the system, suggests a tip of the iceberg recovery rate. A third of NHS Talking Therapy clients have only one assessment/treatment session, Scott (2024). With the haemorrhaging of a third of clients amongst those who have 2 or more treatment sessions. This can scarcely be the ‘Giving Away Psychology’ that the British Psychological Society (BPS) envisaged .
Nevertheless BPS is ploughing on regardless, in its’ self-promotion. Calling for ever greater funding. Whither honesty? Psychology has been not so much ‘Given Away’, as a travesty of it propagandised. The idea of ‘Giving Psychology Away’ goes back to at least the 1990s, just after I became a psychologist, it is time for a more critical re-appraisal of the effectiveness of this approach. In my view it can be done, but only within some well-recognised tram lines, without them it is a juggernaut heading for oblivion.
Dr Mike Scott