The essence of primary care is that it is about helping people get their innate physical and emotional needs met. These needs, the 'human givens', are each individual's genetic inheritance. (Our biology determines that we cannot avoid needing food, water, attention, status, friends, being stretched in life etc.) How well our needs are met clearly depends on the quality of physical and emotional nourishment provided by the environment.

Human givens are intertwined. That is to say, if we are prevented from getting our physical needs met — by famine, accident, illness or ailments — our emotional life is affected. And when our emotional needs are not met and we suffer emotional distress — such as anxiety, anger, depression or psychosis — it can affect our physical health too.

There is a wealth of good information available about treating an individual who is suffering from physical health problems.

But there is a lack of clear information about what happens when emotional needs are not met and how best to treat people who are over-anxious, depressed, traumatised, addicted etc. (most treatment approaches are far too simplistic, such as the medical model, CBT, person centred counselling, hypnotherapy or psychodynamic psychotherapy).

The human givens approach provides, for the first time, a common lingua franca that can bridge in an easily understood manner all the various disciplines that primary care services bring together.

MindFields College exists to teach professionals in the caring community throughout the country and imbue them with larger organising ideas and practical skills — the lingua franca. Its tutors have merged the best available skills from all forms of therapy that are shown to be effective into a cohesive whole and from that position teach a range of proven psychological methods for helping people suffering all forms of emotional distress. As such it provides the most rounded training for counsellors and psychotherapists currently available in the UK and is hugely helpful to all people in related fields.

The Human Givens Institute exists to gather people together who are interested in the bigger picture — true psychological and sociological insights that are above politics, ideology and dogma — and who share these clear organising ideas about what mental health, education, social needs and diplomacy could usefully be based on.

Return to top