ABSTRACT
Having prepared the Clinical Guidelines, National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) passes them onto the statutory agency called Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), whose job it is to deliver these treatments in NICE-approved ways. The author draws heavily on the research published by the Centre for Psychological Therapies in Primary Care at the University of Chester, UK. Their report is an analysis of extensive interviews with managers, commissioners and practitioners in the world of IAPT. The author also draws on material from interviews that he conducted. The principles underpinning IAPT are reminiscent of those behind many a privately run corporation. Like them, IAPT uses the rhetoric of customer care and customer choice to camouflage its neoliberalist ideations. IAPT reports regularly claim that their data shows that the moving to recovery rates are around 50 per cent and are therefore on target.
