TEACHING GPs the skills to offer brief cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) to patients with depression has "no discernible impact" on outcome for the patients, a recent randomised controlled trial has found.[1] But, alas, instead of questioning whether there might be a more effective way for GPs to offer brief therapy for depression within their time constraints, the researchers appear to conclude that GPs need much more training to acquire cognitive behaviour therapy's "complex skills".

Eighty four GPs from practices in North London and 272 of their patients who scored highly on a scale for anxiety and depression took part in the trial. Half of the doctors underwent four half days' training in CBT, designed not only to teach new skills but to increase GPs' belief in their ability to manage patients with depression.

Six months later, the knowledge and attitudes of the doctors who had received the training were little different from that of a control group who had received no training, and there was no evidence of an impact upon patients. In fact, the GPs who had done the training were more likely to refer their patients for specialist help, which lead researcher Professor Michael King and colleagues explain thus: "[The finding] would suggest that the doctors had acquired sufficient skills to know when their own management was likely to be unproductive. Thus training may have had a paradoxical effect in making them feel unable to deal with more complex cases."

The researchers also propose that the focus on patients with severe anxiety/depression or long term problems meant GPs were obliged to use the methods on people they might have considered unsuitable for cognitive behaviour therapy. Another possibility they offer is that GPs did learn new skills but didn't have the time to apply them.

All this is rather sad and does surely indicate a rather slavish adherence to models of therapy shown to be effective in some settings but not others. As the researchers point out, CBT is certainly known to be as effective as medication for the treatment of depression and also reduces rates of long term relapse. It is most effective when given by practitioners, including GPs, who have had extensive instruction in the technique, but it doesn't necessarily transfer very well — as this trial shows — to the setting in which GPs ordinarily work.

The researchers are humble enough to admit that their findings run counter to others where GPs have used brief therapy methods successfully. Brief interventions have worked well when GPs applied them with problem drink-
ing and diabetes. Behavioural and educational self help materials have also been used successfully by GPs to deal with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders. So why not CBT? "Our finding of no benefit suggests that acquiring more complex skills in CBT is not straightforward for general practitioners," the researchers suggest.

We would agree. Training in CBT is not straightforward. It takes a simple, excellent, common sense idea that faulty thinking can affect mental health, the basic tenets of which can be learned in a day or two, and makes a complicated mystery out of it. The concern should be not that GPs need more training but that they need less. For CBT works from an out-of-date premise, which makes it less effective than it could be. It has been discovered that emotion precedes reason and perception and, as a result, some emotional reactions and consequent emotional memories can be formed without any conscious participation from the thinking brain at all.[2]

The APET model

Whereas CBT assumes that anxiety or depression arises from faulty belief systems, the APET model takes into account the latest knowledge about how the brain works and enables it to be used for more effective therapy.[3] For example, black and white thinking, which underlies all the thinking style categories identified by cognitive therapists, is not dysfunctional thinking in the way they define it but the binary thinking style of the emotional brain. It is the result of emotional arousal and conditioning, not the cause.

The A in APET stands for activating agent: any event or stimulus in the environment. Information about that stimulus, taken in through the senses, is processed through the pattern-matching part of the mind (P) which is tagged with an emotion (E) which may inspire certain thoughts (T). Accordingly, the APET model provides many more points of intervention in therapy than simply helping a client to alter their beliefs and attitudes. Each letter of the model symbolises a point of possible change. Sometimes it may be most effective, for instance, to work to change the activating agent (ie an individual's life circumstances). Very often an inappropriate pattern match needs to be changed. So a woman who unconsciously pattern matches to the mental cruelty of her first lover every time she embarks on a new relationship, and consequently sabotages it, needs help to uncouple the connection between the past experience and her present circumstances.

Emotion (the E of the model) always needs to be calmed down before a client can learn to think in a less black and white fashion. It is impossible to communicate fully with anyone who is overly emotionally aroused, and depression is just as aroused an emotional state as anger, even if it is not so apparent to the onlooker. We maintain, unlike in cognitive therapy, that it isn't individuals' faulty thinking which causes a problem but the fact that emotional arousal, with its black and white logic, blocks access to the more subtle reasoning of the higher brain. (Thus the depressed person thinks everything always goes wrong and no relationship will ever work, because there are no greys in black and white thinking.) Teaching people relaxation techniques and working with them while in a state of deep relaxation reduces the emotional brain's paralysing hold over the neocortex.

Finally, as every good cognitive therapist knows, it can be important to work with any unhelpful thoughts or belief patterns (T) when a person's attributional style of thinking is exacerbating the depression.

Whereas cognitive methods are laborious and slow and involve clients in adjusting to the therapist's reality (learning to identify the many categor-
ies of faulty thinking), the human givens approach, based on the APET model, requires therapists to enter the client's reality, and enables them to offer diverse meaningful interventions simultaneously, effecting powerful positive change extremely quickly.

The kinds of techniques used can be seen in the new training video, "In control again", in which a self harming, clinically depressed single mother suffering panic attacks and feelings of paranoia is helped to take control over her life again in just one session of human givens therapy, working from the APET model. We would suggest that GPs could learn more about the nature of depression and how to lift it from studying this than attending any amount of CBT training.

The techniques which make up the armoury of the human givens approach (see "How to lift depression quickly and safely", Human Givens, vol 9, no 1, pages 34—36) are applied not systematically but in accordance with the individual needs of each individual patient. They have been shown to work reliably time and again and are not complex to learn or apply, for either practitioner or patient. As supporters of research into what works, we would welcome the chance to participate in any trial that researchers into psychological therapies might care to construct.

References

1. King, M et al (2002). Effectiveness of teaching general practitioners skills in brief cognitive behaviour therapy to treat patients with depression: randomised controlled trial. British Medical Journal, 324, 947—950.

2. Le Doux, J (1998). The Emotional Brain. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

3. Griffin, J and Tyrrell, I (2000). The APET model: patterns in the brain. HG Publishing.

© Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell 2006

This article first appeared in Volume 9, No, 2 (2002) of the Human Givens journal.

> More information can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

Return to top

> ONLINE REGISTER
   of human givens    psychotherapists and    counsellors

> How a human givens
   therapist can help

Return to top

> Find out more by reading: How to lift depression... fast  

Written without jargon and full of practical advice, this best-selling book is easy-to-read and ideal for anyone who either suffers from depression, or who would like to help others who do.

Return to top