Group Psychotherapy on the Edge: The View From the United Kingdom

In my previous article in GROUP, “The Shadow of the Group in the Dawn of the 21st Century” (Nitsun, 2000), I noted the paradoxical status of group psychotherapy in the United Kingdom at the century’s end. On one hand, the application of group methods in public and private services had visibly increased in the last few decades of the twentieth century. On the other, there was limited recognition of group psychotherapy as a powerful form of therapy in its own right, with its own theoretical lineage and training requirements. Much of the development in group services was fueled by notions of efficiency and expediency rather than by an appreciation of the specific value of group psychotherapy. Fifteen years after my article was published, I believe the paradox still largely exists; in fact, it may have deepened. Group methods have proliferated in services in the United Kingdom, but there remains little regard for the integrity of the practice, its theoretical underpinnings, and, in particular, the need for adequately trained group practitioners. While writing about the situation in the United Kingdom, these descriptions tally with informal commentaries from North America, similarly highlighting the disregard for key aspects of the discipline of group psychotherapy, including the problem of establishing a consistent and robust training framework for the many practitioners running groups. I take these points further in my recently published book, Beyond the Anti-group (Nitsun, 2015). In a chapter titled “Group Psychotherapy on the Edge,” I describe the ambivalence about group psychotherapy in the wider professional mental health community in the United Kingdom and the fragile status accorded group therapy.