I heard recently that a young student in Southampton committed suicide as a result of not being able to cope with IBS. The sad thing is that a health psychologist would have probably been able to help her. IBS is a classic example of how the body and mind sometimes don’t work together in an ideal manner. A friend of mine who studied this for her PhD found that a CBT intervention worked very well with people living with IBS. Unfortunately GPs do not refer to health psychologists; and there are still very few health psychologists working within the NHS. So we either work in academia and/or privately. A student probably wouldn’t be able to afford £40 a week, but her parents may have done…