Wiltshire Human Givens is an active member of the Human Givens Practice Research
Network or HGPRN.
A question we frequently get from those unfamiliar with the human givens approach
is “Where is your evidence?” We think this is a really good question and should be
asked of everyone working in counselling and psychotherapy. Many therapists, however,
have little more than anecdotal evidence to support their claims. Although Cognitive
Behavioural Therapy (CBT) which is currently favoured in the UK by the NICE guidelines
has a good evidence base - the practical application of the model introduces many
variables (e.g. variations between practitioners) which are not addressed by the
initial studies.
The human givens approach is relatively new. Even though there is now an MA in human
givens psychotherapy at Nottingham Trent University, the approach has not yet been
around long enough to have a solid base of peer-reviewed evidence base which will
satisfy the critical eye of scientists and medics. We should not be surprised at
this. Any new idea which claims to be scientific should expect to be met with healthy
scepticism when first introduced. Only after a new approach to therapy has taken
root with a sufficiently large number of people does it stand a chance of being formally
evaluated in a scientific way. The practitioners who already use this approach have
plenty of anecdotal evidence from their own clients to be confident that this approach
is both safe and effective - but we cannot expect everyone else to take our word
for it. We fully accept that we need to show evidence for our claims and are working
hard to satisfy this requirement.
We are an Outcome Informed Practice and are currently taking part in a national research
program to collect client data. As part of this research program, we ask every client
at every session to complete anonymous outcome data using CORE (Clinical Outcomes
Routine Evaluation), ORS (Outcome Rating Scale) and SRS (Session Rating Scale) forms.
We hope eventually that this evidence will clearly demonstrate the effectiveness
of the human givens approach. Initial results are very promising indeed and we hope
to see peer reviewed data within the next year. Watch this space for developments.
