UKCP holds the premier psychotherapy register in Britain and looks after the collective interests of the most highly qualified UK practitioners. It has been at the forefront of attempts to introduce higher standards of national practice and better regulation of therapy for public protection. The websites can be found at www.ukcp.org.uk and www.psychotherapy.org

The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) is the largest psychotherapy organisation in Europe with over 40,000 individual and organisational members.

It is a charity dedicated to promoting the interests of therapy to clients by providing verifiable standards of training and accountability among therapists. It does not sell any therapy services as such. It tells you what standards member therapists have achieved.

It is also the watchdog organisation which in the absence of formal statutory regulation of the talking therapies provides a complaints procedure for clients and an overall Ethical Framework for practitioners.

The website can be found at www.bacp.co.uk and at www.itsgoodtotalk.org.uk. Recently, I have been helping UKCP with their press relations. For more than a decade prior to that I acted as BACP’S Media Consultant and Chief Spokesperson. I gave about 80 interviews a month radio, tv, press and magazines on behalf of BACP and helped produce and manage the annual surveys we conducted to inform about the state of opinion concerning counselling and psychotherapy. If you visit the Media Section of BACPs website, you can read the text of many of these interviews.