May 11, 2007...8:17 pm

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in the United Kingdom

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For the past 6 months or so I have been working on a committee to set up a Special Interest Branch of the BABCP that focuses on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). It has been good to get involved again in organising training and the promotion of evidence-based psychological therapy, something that I used to do when I lived in Perth (when I was in the West Australian branch of the AACBT). Aside from the appeal of letting others know about ACT, I’ve enjoyed having contact with other therapists and researchers who are keen about the science and therapeutic stance that ACT takes.

In my experience, the ACT community has been welcoming and inspiring, living the values of the approach, which includes emphasising the key role of science in developing methods to help people: the hard graft of research, open to skepticism and debate, and remaining linked to basic research and philosophical assumptions. It has seemed a good fit for me with my background training as a scientist-practitioner in clinical psychology.

I hope that the work of the ACT Special Interest Branch in the UK will continue this trend. For those who are curious, the link to the homepage of the ACTSIB is here.

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Filed under Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, CBT, Clinical Psychology, Mindfulness, Psychology, United Kingdom, cognitive behavioural therapy

1 Comment

  • profacero
    March 4, 2008 at 4:38 am

    If I were in your field, I think this is what I’d go into.
    It looks fascinating intellectually. More personally, I found out about it by googling around to see what I could learn to try to counteract the effects of this really strange and destructive therapy I went through, which from what I could tell (slowly, then and in retrospect) was based on a melange of CBT, 12 steps and miscellaneous self-help (I was according to the therapist an “intellectual snob,” though, because I didn’t think self-help was necessarily psychology). Anyway, just reading about it and seeing, through a glass darkly (since I don’t really know a great deal about it) that this was something I could have done, seemed to effect a sea change right there, in itself!

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