About The Group Therapy Centre

We’re a team of mental health specialists dedicated to working with people experiencing mental health difficulties in Cambridgeshire and surrounding counties. We’ve trained and qualified over many years to exacting standards, and devote much of our professional lives to working in the voluntary sector, at the ‘coal face’ of mental health work.
 
Past
Established in 1969 by Ronald Spiers, Dr Ross Mitchell and Bill Lyntott, the Centre is one of Cambridgeshire’s oldest mental health charities. The St Columba Centre, as it was then known, was among the first to provide day care and social facilities for people discharged from Fulbourn Hospital. The idea of ‘patient power’ was  introduced - enabling people, with help from staff, to organise and manage their own care arrangements in ways that best suited them. The concept was far in advance of the times and is only just being rolled out in the NHS and local authorities 40 years later.

Group therapy was introduced later as a proven therapeutic way to help members work through very complex and painful material in aid of their recovery. Over time, as council-run day care centres were established by Cambridgeshire social services, the Centre concentrated its service provision solely on various types of applied group therapy. The Centre took referrals from GPs, mental health professionls and direct from the public.

Present
Today, the Group Therapy Centre offers a wide range of therapies, from traditional psychodynamic approaches including Group Analysis, Art and Music, to modern orientations like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Gestalt, Family Systems, Trauma and Schema Focused therapies.

Staffed by qualified and highly experienced professionals, the Centre is recognised by the public and profession as a vital part of the ‘mental health mix’ in the region, and is the leading charitable provider of group therapies in the UK.

Here, people are seen fast, just a few days from initial contact; and currently around 75 members a week get together to participate in therapy groups that help them discover new ways of working through their problems and engaging in stimulating and healthy activity and relationships.