That sounds all very pre 2010! I'd like
existentialist view on this but things became decidedly worse once IAPT became the gateway.
Lambeth now has Lambeth Living based on the 3rd floor of Streathem job centre who control referrals. Unlike IAPT where you run through tick boxes and scripts like a call centre you'll actually meet a CPN in a local location, who then manages your referral/s from that point.
They also have a quite experienced (worked in different countries) trained (not by the NHS) Psychiatrist - he writes reports as if he'd actually listened to you and understood what you were telling him.
Fuck me it's a revelation
You still will not be seen by any 2ndry mental health team in Lambeth due to the price of cuckou clocks in where-ever but its a good start
I can't speak with any kind of professional authority on IAPT - it's something I've had very little to do with. And, while I think there are people for whom that kind of approach, professionally delivered, can make a real difference, my early anxieties that it would get used as a catch-all for anyone with mental health problems, regardless of their suitability, seem to have been realised - the availability of any kind of service seems to become a binary option to other bureaucratic silos who, without any understanding of the details, perceive the existence of a putative solution to some problems as reason for arguing that anyone still having problems has chosen to "stay ill".
I said I haven't had any professional experience of IAPT, but I have seen clients who had been through the process, and for whom it was, at best, not helpful (of course, I have to point out that it is unlikely that I would encounter those for whom it was a successful intervention). Most of those clients came away with a sense that, because the expected outcomes had not been achieved, they had somehow failed. For quite a few, considerable encouragement was necessary to reassure them that they weren't letting themselves in for more of the same.
Another issue that rears its ugly head is that therapy - any therapy - isn't going to work if the client isn't on board with it. You simply cannot force therapy on someone and expect to make any realistic difference to them. The problem is that, while therapy services like IAPT are founded in the same core principles that all therapeutic approaches use regarding client autonomy, they then become a tool to which other agencies, who are not bound by the same rules, can push people onto. Then, when the intervention fails to achieve any results, the problem is seen by such agencies as a failure on the part of the client.
That of course is not helped by outfits like DWP misusing cod-psychology notions so as to give themselves licence to "treat" benefits claimants using their new (and largely half-baked) ideas - thus we have the referral pathway into IAPT, work coaches, all the manualised motivational bollocks, even the ludicrously over-the-top internal "Woo! Yay! Go us!" management garbage we occasionally get leaks of.
The appalling gap in understanding that MPs habitually demonstrate, barring the occasional bit of first-hand experience, about mental illness makes me seriously doubtful that our politicians are the right people to be making decisions which profoundly influence the way mental health is treated. I think the interest in psychology which began with "nudge units" has spiralled out to encompass a similarly naive view about how to resolve mental health problems in general, and things like IAPT have been elevated into universal panaceas, curing worklessness and unhappiness with equal ease - yes, folks, it's a dessert topping
and a floor wax! Which is pretty unfair on IAPT and its practitioners, and even more unfair on the poor bastards getting funnelled through the process on completely spurious grounds.
IAPT, and all the other approaches, are tools - like a spanner; fine for doing certain jobs, but if you start using them to bang nails in, you wreck both nail and spanner.
