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Psychological therapy today plays a key role in UK public mental health. In large part, this has been through the development of the (specifically English) Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme. Through IAPT, millions of citizens have encountered interventions such as cognitive behaviour therapy, largely for the treatment of depression and anxiety. This article interrogates how this national response to problems of mental ill-health – and the problematization itself – was developed, accounted for, and sustained. By imbricating economic expertise with accounts of mental ill-health and mechanisms of treatment, IAPT has revivified psychological framings of pathology and therapy. However, it has done so in ways that are more familiar within biomedical contexts (e.g. through recourse to randomized controlled trial studies). Today, the initiative is a principal player in relation to which other services are increasingly developed. Indeed, in many respects IAPT has transformed from content to context within UK public mental health (in a process of what I term 'contextification'). By documenting these developments, this paper contributes to re-centring questions about the place and role of psychology in contemporary healthcare. Doing so helps to complicate assumptions about the dominance of linear forms of (de)biomedicalization in health-systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a semi-structured interview study we examined the views of 59 adult women from tive cultural-religious groups in Britain (black Christian, white Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim) on the efficacy of different forms of help for depression and schizophrenia. We compared the perceived effectiveness of religious help with psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic interventions. Religious factors were viewed as more important for depression than for schizophrenia. Of the possible religious interventions, prayer was most often seen as helpful. Between-group differences are described. Religious factors were clearly seen as important in managing mental illness, and this has implications for help-seeking and adherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]