It was developed and introduced by the Labour Party as a result of economic evaluations by Professor Lord Richard Layard, based on new therapy guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence as promoted by clinical psychologist David M. Clark.
The aim of the project is to increase the provision of evidence-based treatments for common mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression by primary care organisations.
Initial demonstration sites reported outcomes in line with predictions in terms of the number of people treated (especially with 'low intensity' interventions such as 'guided self-help') and the percentages classified as recovered and as in more employment (a small minority) to ten months later.
Some complained of seeing more 'revolving door' patients and excess complexity of cases, while the NHS has acknowledged problems with waiting times and recovery rates.
However Norman Lamb, who championed IAPT within the coalition government 2010-2015, disagreed with picking faults with such an extensive and world-leading advance in evidence-based treatment.
Similarly, the use of the PHQ-9 in calculating recovery rates for treatment targets has been questioned considering the difficulty a significant minority of the population may have in understanding its content.
[21] The March 2021 issue of the British Journal of Clinical Psychology has highlighted the considerable controversy over IAPT's claims of success, Scott( 2021)26 https://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fbjc.12264 and Kellett et al., (2021)27 have responded with their own commentary ‘The costs and benefits of practice-based evidence: Correcting some misunderstandings about the 10-year meta-analysis of IAPT studies’ Richard Layard, a labour economist at the London School of Economics, had become influential in New Labour party politics and was appointed to the House of Lords in 2000.
He had a particular interest in the happiness of populations and mental health; his father, John Layard, was an anthropologist who had survived suicidal depression and retrained as a Jungian psychologist after undergoing psychoanalysis by Carl Jung.
[22] In 2003 Richard Layard met the clinical psychologist David M. Clark, a leading figure in cognitive behavioral therapy who was running the Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma (with Anke Ehlers and Paul Salkovskis) at the Institute of Psychiatry and Maudsley Hospital.
Clark professed to high rates of improvement from CBT but low availability of the therapy despite NICE guidelines now recommending it for several mental disorders.
[24][25] This facilitated the development of IAPT initiatives,[26] including two demonstration sites (pilot studies) and then training schemes for new types of psychological practitioner.
In the official publication of the British Psychological Society in 2009, experienced clinical psychologists John Marzillier and Professor John Hall strongly criticised IAPT's promoters for glossing over both the data gaps acknowledged in the NICE reports and the complexity of the multiple issues typically affecting people with mental health problems and their ability to sustain employment;[27] they were met with much agreement as well as angry criticism.