THE healing power of horses lies at the heart of Bryony Whittaker’s successful Haslemere mental health clinic.

A trained psychologist, Bryony’s hope is the benefits she has seen for clients attending the equine facilitated psychotherapy (EFP) sessions she leads with the help of her four horses at her Thursley stables, can assist the many others, unaware that such a treatment exists.

She has contacted Haslemere MP Jeremy Hunt, who is the Conservative Government’s Health Secretary, to urge that EFT should be included as a beneficial treatment in the government’s ‘Stepping Forward‘ mental health workforce plan to 2020/21.

“The mental health clinic I run in Haslemere offers talking therapies but specialises in EFP,” she said.

“We see individuals from the NHS including the core focal areas of child and adolescent mental health services, perinatal care, anxiety, depression and psychosis.

“We also hold contracts with large private mental health care providers for whom we offer sessions for addiction and eating disorders inpatient rehabilitation programmes. Unfortunately however, despite a growing body of research, all our clients other than charitable contributions are still privately funded.

“We have been in contact with Jeremy Hunt to offer our support in the local area and hope to be involved in offering EFP to a wider audience.

“But I suspect there is just not much known publicly about the field and how impactful it is, currently. I would like to help raise the profile of EFP as it is rapidly becoming a ’buzz word’.”

Bryony’s four trusty horses Harry, Mango, Billy and Kitty are key to the success of her sessions and each client is assigned the horse with the best temperament to support the two-way process.

The sessions do not involve riding, they are about building an emotional rapport between client and horse that, in turn, builds confidence and assists recovery.

Bryony trained with Leap Equine, organisational members of The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, which states: “Neuroscience has shown us remarkable similarities between the limbic (emotional) brain of horses and humans, which make it possible for horses to serve as both our mirrors and our teachers in terms of understanding ourselves, our emotional life, and the way we relate to ourselves and those around us.”

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