Editorial

The five papers in our summer issue of the journal focus on primary care and medically unexplained symptoms (MUS), and convincingly demonstrate the continued relevance of psychoanalytic thinking and its applications within the NHS and public sector by describing innovations in theory and practice in these two related and topical areas, both very much in need of psychotherapeutic assistance.

The first two papers by Julian Stern, Emily Hard and Brian Rock, describe an innovative and award winning NHS psychotherapy service – the City and Hackney Primary Care Psychotherapy Consultation Service (PCPCS) – designed to support GPs in their care of patients with complex psychological and physical needs, many of whom will have MUS. These papers follow on from a previously published paper in this journal (Carrington, Rock, & Stern, 2012), and describe in detail the historical, political and economic context within which the service originated over five years ago, how the service has evolved since then in response to both local and national need, and how it operates in providing a modern clinical service delivered by a multidisciplinary team with on-going measurement of efficacy and cost efficiency whilst maintaining its psychoanalytic core.

Dynamic interpersonal therapy (DIT) is one of the therapeutic modalities offered within the PCPCS, and this psychoanalytically informed treatment, developed of course by the previous Editor of this journal, Alessandra Lemma, is the subject of the next three papers. First, and staying within a primary care setting, Daniel Wright and Deborah Abrahams describe their study into the effectiveness of DIT as a treatment for depression and anxiety, in an inner city IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) service. Although their findings that patients' depression and anxiety symptoms significantly decreased with DIT treatment cannot be definitively accounted for by the intervention given the methodological limitations of the study, the pape