Tailored Psychological Treatments

The best part about psychological treatment is that it is tailored to suit your individual needs. Each of the therapies listed below are evidence based psychological treatments, which means research has shown them to be effective in helping people with a range of difficulties such as anxiety and depression.

Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT has developed as a behavioural intervention to help people learn strategies to live life more in the present, more focused on important values and goals, and less focused on painful thoughts, feelings and experiences. ACT teaches people how to engage with and overcome painful thoughts and feelings through acceptance and mindfulness techniques, to develop self-compassion and flexibility, and to build life-enhancing patterns of behaviour.
For more information on ACT you can visit Contextual Psychology.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)

CBT is the term used for a school of therapies that share the underlying assumption that people are disturbed not by events in their lives but by their beliefs about those events. It is a logical and practical approach to help people with their emotional problems by changing their thinking and their behaviour.
For more information on CBT you can visit the Australian Association for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

DBT is a treatment that was initially designed for individuals with self-harm behaviors, such as self-cutting, suicide thoughts, urges to suicide, and suicide attempts. Many clients with these behaviors meet criteria for a disorder called Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). DBT is now also being used with women who binge-eat, teenagers who are depressed and suicidal, and older clients who experience recurrent periods of depression. It also has emerging research for it’s effectiveness with other mood disorders such as depression. DBT aims to help people ‘build a life worth living’, and teaches people life skills such as how to tolerate distress, how to manage your emotions, and how to have more meaningful relationships.
For more information on DBT you can visit Behavioral Tech.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness Meditation is becoming widely popular as an adjunct to conventional medical and psychological therapies. Mindfulness is the act of deliberately paying attention in a particular way. This particular way involves bringing the attention back to the present moment and being non judgemental. So we become aware of the full range of experience including sensory impressions, thoughts, imagery emotions, urges and impulses. We even can become aware of the quality of mindfulness itself – whether the mind is calm and clear, or agitated, dull and foggy.

Because we do not judge either the content or processes of our mind, we become freer to observe without identifying with the contents of our thoughts. It is as if we are watching the stream of consciousness rather than swimming in it and being buffeted by its eddies and currents.
To find out more about Mindfulness click here.

If you would like information on various psychological issues, the Centre for Clinical Interventions has lots of free and useful handouts. The handouts cover issues such as depression, anxiety, procrastination, perfectionism, anger, and eating disorders.