Around a quarter of UK adults have had an experience of therapy they would describe as helpful.
That figure comes from the BACP’s own annual Public Perceptions Survey, and it is not a criticism of therapy. It is arithmetic. Thirty-seven per cent of adults have seen a therapist at some point in their lives. Of those, 72% said it was helpful. Multiply the two and you arrive at roughly 27% of the adult population.
Around 63% have never had therapy at all. Around another 10% have had therapy but did not find it helpful.
These figures come from the BACP’s 2026 Public Perceptions Survey, a nationally representative sample of 5,058 UK adults aged 16 and over, carried out by YouGov between 16 February and 6 March 2026.
Which means around three quarters of UK adults have not had an experience of therapy they would describe as helpful.
Those three quarters are who this article is about.
The ones who went
The 10% are the smaller and more uncomfortable number, and they are rarely mentioned. No form of support helps everybody. Therapy helps many people, and I have spent 26 years watching it do exactly that. It also is not the right fit for everyone who tries it.
There is a second question underneath that figure, which is when we ask.
Most satisfaction is measured during or at the end of therapy, when someone has chosen to continue attending and the work has reached its natural conclusion. That tells us something valuable about how they felt at that point in time. It tells us much less about whether those changes lasted six months, a year or two years later, because those questions are rarely asked in ordinary private practice.
That does not make the figures wrong. It simply reminds us what they are actually measuring.
The ones who never went
The 63% are the bigger story, and they receive remarkably little attention.
We tend to explain them in terms of barriers, as though everyone in that group is a thwarted client. Waiting lists, cost and availability. Those are real and they account for a good number of people.
But they do not account for most of them. A great many people have not been prevented from having therapy. They have considered it and decided against it, and they are not waiting to be persuaded.
They do not want to be vulnerable in front of a stranger. They do not want the worst of what they are carrying written into notes. They do not want to arrange their week around a fixed hour, or to talk on Tuesday afternoon about something that was at its worst on Saturday night. They do not trust easily, often for reasons that have proved themselves.
For many people, those are not barriers waiting to be removed. They are preferences, and preferences rarely change because somebody explains why they should not exist.
What follows from that
Here is the part I think our field has not fully absorbed.
Even if therapy helped every single person who chose it, most adults still would not be in that group.
For a long time we have talked as though therapy were the default answer for almost everyone. As though the right response to almost any difficulty is that you should see someone, and everything else is a substitute for the thing you should really be doing.
That framing has a cost, and the people who pay it are the three quarters. If therapy is the standard, then a person who doesn’t want it isn’t seen as needing something different. They’re often assumed to be in denial, avoiding help or simply not ready. And the alternatives, being second best by definition, are barely offered at all.
They are not waiting to be persuaded.
They have different requirements, and until recently there was very little designed with those in mind.
What that means in practice
If someone tells you therapy is not for them, they are giving you information rather than raising an objection. The useful next question is what would suit them, not how to change their mind.
If you work in this field, the people you never meet are not a marketing failure. They are the majority, and they need somewhere to go that is not us.
And if you are one of the three quarters, reading this and recognising yourself: your reasons are not a failure of nerve. They are reasons. What you need is something built for people who have them.
The option that helps nobody is the one a great many people take, which is nothing at all, because nothing on offer was what they wanted.
It’s one of the reasons I created MindMotive AI and Otto. For many people, therapy never was the answer.
About the Author
Karen Ferguson is the founder of MindMotive AI, where she develops Digital Partners designed for specific purposes. Otto, built to help people make sense of situations, relationships and decisions at the point they need to, is one of them.
She has worked as a therapist for 26 years, as a hypnotherapist since 2000 and later as a counsellor, and for nearly 20 of those years as a trainer and supervisor. She has trained more than 1,000 therapists.
MindMotive AI was created in response to a simple question: what happens to the people who never access traditional forms of support? Karen’s work combines decades of professional experience with the deliberate development of Digital Partners designed to give people another way of accessing support when and how they choose.
Karen is a Fellow of the ACCPH (Accredited Counsellors, Coaches, Psychotherapists and Hypnotherapists).