Person-Centred Experiential Counselling for Depression

David Murphy, PhD., is a Chartered Psychologist, Full Member of the Division of Counselling Psychology, Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and registered member of General Psychotherapy Council. He is Professor of Psychology and Education and Director for the Centre for Research in Human Flourishing at The University of Nottingham, England. David’s previous books include Person-Centred Experiential Counselling for Depression Second Edition published by Sage. He is editor of the official British Psychological Society-Wiley published Counselling Psychology: A textbook for study and practice (2017). He is Co-editor of Relational Depth: New Perspective and Developments (2012, with Rosanne Knox, Sue Wiggins and Mick Cooper), published by Palgrave MacMillan, and Co-editor of Trauma and the Therapeutic Relationship (2013, with Stephen Joseph) published by Palgrave MacMillan. He has over 90 peer review journal papers and book chapters in the field of counselling, psychotherapy, and education. He was editor of Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, the international journal for the World Association for Person-Centred and Experiential Psychotherapy and Counselling.     Dr Peter Pearce is Director of Clinical Training at Metanoia Institute, London, where he has held senior academic and leadership roles for over two decades, including Faculty Head for Applied Social and Organisational Sciences and Head of the Person-Centred Department. Peter’s clinical career began in NHS community multidisciplinary teams specialising in adult mental health and learning disability services, where he held clinical and consultant roles for almost 20 years. He led the Metanoia Institute team that collaborated with NHS England and BACP’s Research and Professional Standards departments, to co-author the National Curriculum for Person-Centred Experiential Counselling for Depression (PCE-CfD) and serves on the Expert Advisory Group for the NHS Talking Therapies (formerly IAPT) programme. In 2022 Peter chaired the QAA Benchmark Statement group for Counselling and Psychotherapy.  Peter has been principal or co-investigator and Clinical Lead on a number of large-scale, national and European-funded, research projects, including ETHOS, ALIGN, ProReal, and HEROINES, with a sustained focus on practice-based and relationally grounded evidence in work with adults, young people and marginalised groups. The ETHOS team received the 2023 BACP Outstanding Research Award. His publications include multiple peer-reviewed journal articles, books and book chapters, as well as co-editing Person-Centred Practice at the Difficult Edge (2014).He is regularly invited to contribute to national policy, workforce development, and professional standards initiatives, and continues to supervise and examine doctoral students, advise on NHS workforce practice innovation, and train therapists in the person-centred tradition.

For multiple reasons, I think this is an important book.  It is both a labour of love and a labour of political necessity:  The authors share a deep love for person-centred-experiential psychotherapy, grounded in decades-long experience as counsellors, trainers and scholars.  They also recognize the importance of dialog and engagement with medicalized mental health care in the UK and elsewhere, arising out of the challenges of the recent past and speaking to the present moment across the current array of humanistic-experiential psychotherapies.  I see a real shift in this book toward a more balanced consideration of the role of process-facilitation in PCE-CfD, underscoring the continuity between a more traditional person-centred approach and related approaches like Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). That the authors were able to achieve this hard-won bridge-building bodes well for the future of humanistic-experiential psychotherapies in general.

• 1 Introduction2 Person-Centred Experiential Therapy3 The Person-Centred Experiential Theory of Depression4 First Meetings and the Initial Phase Sessions5 Early Sessions Phase of PCE-CfD6 Middle Phase Sessions7 Final Phase and Endings8 Training, Supervision and Research9 Future Orientations and Conclusions