If the author disagrees, but we are satisfied that the work has been published elsewhere, is in the public domain and the complainant can fully prove it is their work, we will publish a clarification in the next available issue or as soon as possible. If the complainant can't provide this evidence, we will take no further action. The final decision will rest with BACP. Online posting by authors after publication Case studies make interesting and valuable reading. Try to include the client's voice wherever possible, either through first-person accounts or by using brief, anonymised case studies to illustrate your points. See guidelines on client confidentiality below. Figures Department of Health. 2010 to 2015 Government policy: dementia. London: www.gov.uk/government/publications/2010-to-2015-government-policy-dementia It’s startling to read such a clear description of a phenomenon that is, arguably, besetting much of the Western world right now. We are seeing a greater prevalence of grief in extraordinarily grief-full times, and there is a growing realisation that maybe we need to come up with different ways to support those struggling with their grief, because current resources may not be enough. Another gay woman told me she started a relationship with a trans woman and that the therapist ‘was so fascinated by my partner’s genitals and experiences I had to stop the session, and remind her I was the client, not my partner’.

W]hether they are a person living with dementia, supporting a relative or friend, or someone concerned, [the film] could be used as a staff development tool but also as a vehicle for allowing people with dementia and their families to open up about their feelings and the impact of the condition on their relationships.’ The need to connect is perhaps one reason why there are several thriving and lively Facebook groups for therapists, often the result of an individual practitioner taking the initiative to set up a group where they saw a need. One such therapist is Katie Rose, who recently started a Facebook group for UK therapists working for the US platform BetterHelp. The offer to clients of ‘24/7’ access to their therapist via messaging is just one reason why this subscription-based platform is controversial, but few practitioners are in a position to outright dismiss new potential sources of income. Rose set up the group to help UK therapists make working for the platform work to their advantage. In our ‘Big issue’ feature this month, I take a look at the other reasons why this platform is considered controversial, plus some of the home-grown versions, and the pros and cons for both therapists and clients of accessing and providing therapy this way. It made me think about the role that language plays in shaping our beliefs or knowledge around a subject. My personal bugbear is the use of ‘therapy’ rather than ‘practices’ after the word ‘conversion’ (we’ve used ‘conversion therapy’ in this issue as it’s the accepted terminology). I wonder whether the attachment of the word ‘therapy’ to the name of this heinous practice conveys an inaccurate impression of our profession’s culpability, when the reality is that – as Dr Igi Moon, Chair of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) Coalition Against Conversion Therapy, said in our ‘Big interview’ this time last year – according to a 2018 survey by the Government Equalities Office, it is mainly faith organisations that are offering and carrying out conversion practices (in 53% of cases); 19% of respondents said that the conversion practice had been conducted by healthcare providers or medical professionals and 16% by their parents, guardians or other family members. As Dr Moon said, there are no statistics about therapists. So, what do these results mean for the counselling profession? Professor Michael Barkham, who led the PRaCTICED trial team at the University of Sheffield, says the levelling off in benefit from the PCET interventions by one-year follow-up suggests that practitioners need to examine how they can adapt their interventions to better equip people to cope in the long term. For Cooper, these findings highlight a need for the person-centred counselling profession – and that means most counsellors raised on Carl Rogers’ theories of personality change and the six ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ – to re-examine their model of practice. ‘I think there needs to be a rethink around what school counselling looks like. For some clients, it may be of greater value if it delivers more direction, more structure and more skills around developing their [young people’s] coping abilities.’ I have since recommended it to a number of clients – co-written by a US psychiatrist and a psychologist, it’s an accessible and well-written introduction to attachment styles. And it seems that thanks to this book, and TikTok, young people are growing up with awareness, curiosity and understanding of the unconscious dynamics that can influence relationships.I spoke to a number of people about their experience with therapists. Some reported positive experiences, and that they sometimes found it helpful talking to heterosexual therapists who might bring a fresh perspective. But this was not the case for everyone. There are a lifetime of stories that need to be told and heard, and there’s depression and righteous anger about the here-and-now too – at ageism and the loss of visibility, community, mobility, health, respect and independence. Intrigued? Turn to our feature on counselling older people. Our cover theme, the ‘Big issue’ report ‘Riding the waves’, assesses the impact of the predicted post-COVID mental health tsunami and confirms what many of us know from our own practice – that it’s the most vulnerable in our society who have been most impacted. In this article, we ask what needs to happen now to minimise the effects.

As soon as you go to scale, there’s this inverse thing that happens in that you automatically have a reduction in how closely you can oversee what’s happening. Some say that providing something is better than nothing, but I’m not entirely sure that’s true because there can be bad practice and people can get into trouble. I’m not commenting on any specific services, but in our experience, the more we grew, the less able we were to spend time getting to know our clinicians. In the end, we didn’t feel confident scaling a service that is fundamentally a very sensitive and intimate affair. Speaking just from our experience, I’d say that we were therapists first, having a go at innovation, and in the tech sense we didn’t really succeed. On the other hand, there are those who are great at innovation but know little about therapy – ideally mental health innovations should be arrived at in close conversation between both.’ If you're writing about a piece of research, present it as a narrative, not in the style of an academic essay. Engage the reader with a lively opening paragraph setting out your argument. Case studies Carolyn Mumby, who currently chairs BACP Coaching, followed a similar professional trajectory, starting out as a person-centred counsellor working with young people and progressing to train in coaching and leadership. She relates strongly to the ETHOS finding that young people aren’t always comfortable with the person-centred approach. ‘What I found is that they didn’t respond to only being told “this is your space” – they were often coming with a particular problem that they wanted to solve. Some young people do need more of a holding space where they can have that sense of relationship, but what I found when I was running a service for young people was that practitioners were beginning to engage them in a more proactive way – working with them on how to make decisions and resolve problems, giving them information and techniques that they could use to help them move forward. As a CBT practitioner, he uses exposure to challenge the avoidance: ‘What is striking in research is that a strong predictor of complex grief is the fear people have of the intensity of their pain – they endorse statements saying the pain would be unbearable, too intense. Such catastrophic misinterpretations or phobia-like predictions are strong predictors of complex or prolonged grief. CBT is about targeting that avoidance and gradually confronting the loss, the irreversibility, the pain, the implications, but very gently, at the pace of the client, which is central to the approach. CBT asks the client to test these fears. We don’t aim to take away the pain; we try to turn the unhealthy grief into healthy grief that people can live with. So the grief doesn’t necessarily decrease but people learn how to build their activities around it and are less preoccupied with their loss.’ There is a generation of gay men still alive today who were criminalised and imprisoned. Being gay is still illegal in 70 countries and subject to the death penalty in around 11, and thousands of gay people still come to London from across the world for sanctuary. Even in the UK, it’s only in the past 20 years that legal inequalities have begun to significantly improve. And while we can eliminate laws, the shame and trauma inflicted on people over generations are not so easy to erase. Although young people today are growing up in a very different world to that experienced by previous generations, it is still hard to be different.Taking outcome measures can help validate a client’s sense of distress – that they really do need help, which for some is important if they are to engage with therapy. Continuing to do so then provides a measure of progress, or an alert that progress has stopped. But McInnes’ own main reason for doing it originally was curiosity, he says. ‘I wanted to know how I compared with the overall effect rate. What’s my effect size? I’d be disappointed if therapists had no curiosity to know what difference they are making.’ In the US, leading bereavement researcher and psychologist Professor Robert Neimeyer has published several papers on the impact of COVID-related deaths on people and their risk of developing PGD. 2 Similarly, the ‘equivalence’ that the PRaCTICED trial established between CBT and PCET faded away after the initial six-month assessment. By one year, people who had received CBT were doing better than those who had PCET and more of those in the PCET group were looking to return to therapy, while those in the CBT group were more likely to be using the techniques they had learned in therapy to help them through recurring difficulties. If you use any information obtained privately, for example in conversation, correspondence or discussion with third parties, please confirm that you have referenced all the individuals concerned and have their permission to use the material. Family members