Nidotherapy Workshop 2023

The 2023 Nidotherapy Workshop was held on 1st and 2nd November, 2023 at the Hamilton Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex. It was organised by Nessie Shia, Lecturer and Mental Health Module Lead at the University.  Thirty-one delegates attended.

 

On the first day, after a brief introduction to nidotherapy for those who were unfamiliar with the subject,  Sarah Anderson, CEO of The Listening Place, a charity set up in 2016 to help people in London who were suicidal, and her husband, Terrence Collis, gave a sparkling presentation on the success of their charity in reaching out to Londoners. The Listening Place provides face to face meetings by appointment and often continues support well after the 6 session initial contact. It is staffed by over 1500 volunteers who have now seen 25,000 people with suicidal ideation in the past six years, 72% of them from NHS services and covering 32 London boroughs. The volunteers are grouped into helping, listening, supervising and consultant categories and as each become more experienced they move up the scale

 

In questioning it was asked what would happen when they become saturated with referrals. The answer was simple – ‘we will just train more volunteers’.

 

This session was followed by a presentation on the recruitment of volunteers for nidotherapy once the Advice and Training Centre was open. NIDUS-UK will be doing very well if gets anywhere near 10% of the numbers in The Listening Place.

 

On the afternoon of 1st November Claire Grant and Christine Elder-Ennis from Horton Rehabilitation Services in Surrey presented the first ten months of the nidotherapy initiative in Horton.  This had proceeded very well and had been readily accepted by all the staff and patients there. Good follow-up arrangements had been made to ensure that progress was maintained after discharge.

 

Later in the afternoon Peter Tyrer showed how the new ICD-11 classification of personality disorder could be harnessed to help people in nidotherapy.  The last session of the day was fronted by Maria Anderson, who had used the principles of nidotherapy to improve her own management of bipolar disorder by allowing her to control her own drug treatment in response to warning signs about her symptoms.  This is explained further in Peter Tyrer’s book - Intelligent Drug Prescribing in Psychiatry: Supporting the Patient-Prescriber Partnership to be published by Taylor & Francis (2024).

 

The 2nd November was devoted to discussion about the opening of Nidotherapy Advice and Training Centre in Cotham, Nottinghamshire in May 2024 and a proposed village project in the county. This was a project originally envisaged in Lincolnshire but abandoned, and involves whole communities being exposed to nidotherapy so that common environmental decisions can be made.

 

The next Nidotherapy Workshop will be held in 2024 after the Advice and Training Centre is opened.