Is CBT for psychosis available everywhere?

Dr Emmanuelle Peters: Unfortunately, CBT for psychosis is not available everywhere in the country. It’s quite patchy at the moment as far as my understanding goes. The reason for that is that it’s quite a specialised therapy and it’s only really a recent therapy, it’s only recently that it was thought that any kind of talking therapy would be helpful to people with psychosis. So it is quite patchy and availability of CBT for psychosis will depend on having a trained therapist within a mental health team who would be able to deliver that.

There are some specialist services such as ours, the PiCuP clinic, that basically deliver CBT for psychosis and provide supervision and training to other therapists. I don’t know how many other specialist therapists, specialist services, there are in the country. On the whole people who do this kind of work tend to work in mental health teams but hopefully we all try very hard to make this provision more accessible to everybody in the country

How do I find out if CBT for psychosis is available in my area?

Well, the best place to start really is with your GP. Most GPs will not have direct access to a CBT for psychosis therapist. However, they may have, well they will have, access to a mental health team, a community mental health team, and that’s usually the first port of referral, so you would be referred to a community mental health team and this mental health team may have a therapist who is trained and has enough skills to do CBT for psychosis.

If there is nobody in that mental health team, then it’s about trying to find potentially a specialist team, a specialist service such as ours, who will be able to give CBT for psychosis. There are also some private routes; there are very few private practitioners who do this kind of work, mostly because it’s much better to be part of a team because the person usually needs medication and may have other on-going social needs so the best place to do this type of therapy is always within a team.