About

CBTish is a blog about cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and related things.

My intention is that it will be centred on CBT in private practice in the United Kingdom, but at the same time range widely over related topics.

The ripples in my banner image are meant to represent this sense of having an obvious centre but also rippling out over surrounding places.

Ripples

CBT is related to other therapies and treatments, including the medical (like primary care, psychology and psychiatry), less strongly the complementary (like hypnosis and meditation), and weakly the alternative (like, er, anything else).

Private practice effectively means being self-employed or in a partnership. Most (but not all) who practise CBT in employment in the UK are employed by the National Health Service (NHS), so that what happens in the NHS can affect other practitioners too.

The UK‘s CBT research and practice is strongly related to work in other English-speaking countries, mainly the US, so that will also be reflected here.

So these are the principal ripples.

Organizations

The development of CBT in the UK seems to be focused in three organizations: the BABCP, the Department of Health, and the NHS.

The BABCP is the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies, a quasi-professional body for CBT therapists, but by no means the only organization that represents CBT therapists here.

The Department of Health (DH) is simply a government department, though government has complex ripples of its own.

The NHS is a collection of trusts that are partly independent and partly herded by the DH, so that they are both somewhat conformist and somewhat wayward.

These organizations lurk beneath the surface of CBT.

Only time will tell

Only time will tell what this blog will become, and indeed whether it will become anything at all, but today as I start to write here, this is what I am thinking.