HG newsletter - April 2025
In this issue:
Strong evidence of HG therapy's effectiveness
HG Diploma Open Evening
New Partnership of Psychotherapy and Counselling Bodies
'Montreal Review' features Human Needs Charter
Spring Reading Recommendations
Food for thought
Strong evidence of HG therapy's effectiveness
A second study by researchers at Kings College London has confirmed HG therapy as delivered by HG practitioners for the charity PTSD Resolution results in rates of recovery similar to those achieved by the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service (now known as NHS Talking Therapies). What is more, the treatment was significantly more acceptable to veterans, with a far lower dropout rate.
PTSD Resolution (PTSD-R) provides treatment to military veterans and reservists struggling both with PTSD and with other mental health difficulties, often exacerbated by difficulties finding a place in civilian life and commonly resulting in addictions, criminal convictions and relationship breakdown – families affected are entitled to treatment too.
The first study, published in Occupational Medicine in 2019, concluded that treatment with PTSD-R was an acceptable alternative to treatment through IAPT. However, full comparison was challenging because of different outcome measures used. (See https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqz045)
This time, researchers used the recommendations set by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for collecting ‘real world evidence’ – evidence collected from routine clinical practice, which includes data from a wide range of patients with varied characteristics, challenges and treatment histories. Evidence collected in line with the stringent requirements for real world evidence is deemed to provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of interventions. The results were benchmarked against the NHS IAPT service in general, IAPT for veterans in particular and another service for veterans that followed IAPT procedures.
The study, just published in Occupational Medicine, confirm that PTSD-R clients show similar improvement to IAPT patients, suggesting consistent results over time. “The current service evaluation found PTSD-R to have a recovery rate and reliable improvement rate in line with NHS England standards,” conclude the researchers. (See https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqaf012)
“The findings also show that treatment with PTSD-R had much higher acceptability, with a far lower dropout rate,” comments Bill Andrews, research coordinator for the study. “So not only are the results comparable with no statistical difference in recovery rates, but are based on a much higher percentage of people staying in treatment. In total, 82 per cent stayed to an agreed planned ending, compared with ‘completion’ rates in the NHS service (defined as attending at least two sessions) of around 55 per cent.”
You can hear Bill talking about the research here in a 7 minute video:
FIND OUT MORE - join the webinar on Thursday 1st May 25
If you would like to know more about this and PTSD-R’s next research project, you can join their webinar on Thursday 1st May from 6–7.30pm BST, using this link. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82745331320?pwd=kaGmFh3nNEJ63qQeBapYCToQMWjHP1.1&from=addon
Diploma Open Evening - online
Wed 14th May • 6.30pm BST
People travel from all over the world to take the Human Givens Diploma – if you've been thinking about joining them and would like to know more about what the teaching involves and the opportunities it could open up for you, join HG College's educational director Dr Gareth Hughes live online for our next FREE Open Evening.
NEW Partnership of Counselling and Psychotherapy Bodies (PCPB)
The Human Givens Institute (HGI) is one of the founding members of the recently established Partnership of Counselling and Psychotherapy Bodies (PCPB), along with the other five PSA-accredited bodies which together published the Scope of Practice and Education for Counselling and Psychotherapy (SCoPEd) framework in 2023. (This document has now been updated to include HG Therapists in all three of the SCoPEd columns.)
The idea is that the PCPB (which represents over 75,000 therapists) can have an increasingly powerful voice beyond the SCoPEd framework collaboration to improve standards in the profession and ensure that it is trusted, respected and more widely understood by the public. Their new website offers a central platform for updates on the SCoPEd framework and other PCPB initiatives.
The HGI has always been known and respected for ploughing its own furrow and forging a thoroughly commonsense approach to therapy training and delivery, which we continue to do. To ensure that specified standards for therapy training and delivery include our individual, highly effective way of working, it has been crucial to be, and continue to be, part of this important initiative. This will be especially true if there is a move to increased regulation in the UK in the future.
'The Montréal Review' features Human Needs Charter
The recently published Human Needs in Politics - The Charter has been picked up by The Montreal Review, who feature a brilliant, insightful article by John Bell and Ivan Tyrrell on the unstable state of the world and what we urgently need to do to redress it.
"It is rare to live through a shift in history as significant as today’s..."
Read article >
BOOK REVIEWS
Spring reading recommendations
We have three books to recommend to our readers this month, all of which accord with and illuminate HG understandings. Tribal, by cultural psychologist Michael Morris, is a fascinating account of how our tribal instincts, far from holding us back, can explain some of our greatest advances, showing along the way why attempts at cultural change sometimes take firm hold and sometimes fail miserably.
(Read review by Denise Winn)
Anyone interested in human givens ideas will know about the power of the imagination. In The Shape of Things Unseen, neurologist Adam Zeman presents a vivid kaleidoscope of information about everything that relies on imagination, cantering through the many different forms that imagination takes, right from evolution and developmental stages through to the variety of its possibilities, now and in the future, and, sometimes, potential to cause problems.
(Read review)
And, if you are troubled by current trends towards over-diagnosis and over-medicalisation, The Age of Diagnosis by neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan is the book for you. She explores in forensic detail whether widening the net of physical and mental health ‘conditions’ to include more and more people may do more harm than good. (Read review)
Food for thought
"In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity..."
Albert Einstein
We hope you've enjoyed our latest newsletter.
If you have any interesting news or case studies you think others might like to know about do contact us – we'd love to hear from you!
Jane Tyrrell
Editor, Human Givens News
