Therapy in the UK

This is the practical part of the site, and the part worth reading first.

In the UK, “psychotherapist”, “counsellor” and “therapist” are not protected titles. Anyone may use them, whatever their training. The professions that are protected by law — practitioner psychologist, art therapist, dramatherapist, music therapist and the rest — are a separate and much smaller set. That single fact reshapes every practical question a member of the public has, because it means the useful question is never what somebody calls themselves. It is which register they are on, who oversees that register, what it checked before listing them, and what happens if something goes wrong.

The pages below work through that, and through the ordinary business of getting seen: how NHS self-referral works in England, what the arrangements are in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, what therapy costs and who pays, and what actually happens in a first appointment.

The organisations named on these pages

Every body linked from this site is a professional register, a regulator, a public health service or a published piece of research. No individual practitioner is named or recommended anywhere on this site, and no listing here is an endorsement of any particular person. Where a body runs a directory, the link goes to the directory’s front door so you can search it yourself.