'Happiness tsar' warns of therapy funding shortage

Radical plans to set up free "therapy for all" centres across the country could fail without proper funding, the Government's "happiness tsar" has warned.

Professor Richard Layard, the Labour peer and No 10 adviser, said he is concerned that patients suffering from anxiety and depression will not benefit unless cash is set aside for training up therapists.

In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, Lord Layard said: "There should be a proper plan for dealing with this problem and not a bit of a fudge of a bit of money that ends up with the creation of dumbed-down workforce."

The eminent economist has said he believes mental illness is the single greatest threat to a happy life.

Last year, he published a report calling for a network of 250 treatment centres to be established staffed by 10,000 new therapists.

These would provide "talking therapies" such as cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) - a treatment proven to help relieve low- level depression and anxiety which enables patients to overcome negative thinking.

Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Health, has said she wants to increase the use of counselling and announced the opening of two talking therapy pilot centres in Doncaster and East London.

This Thursday at a conference in London, Ms Hewitt is expected to further endorse the long-term ben-efits of therapy, as opposed to the quick fix results from anti-depressants, for those suffering from mild depression and anxiety. However, the Government has yet to commit to a comprehensive programme for talking therapies on the NHS on the scale suggested by Lord Layard. He says that unless the money is set aside now, then neither the patients nor the economy will benefit.

"I've never said CBT is a magic bullet," said Professor Layard, professor emer-itous of economics at the London School of Economics. "But there is the danger that if people are not properly trained, the patients will not benefit."

An estimated one million people suffer from clinical depression and four million from clinical anxiety in Britainy. But only one in 10 gets to see a therapist and often only after a long wait.

This newspaper revealed earlier this year that around a third of NHS trusts are struggling with a backlog of patients desperate for talking therapies. More than 90 per cent of trusts have waiting lists of longer than a year for CBT. Wakefield West PCT in Yorkshire has a waiting list of 78 weeks.

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