Mental health tools
Psychological treatments (therapies) are powerful tools that assist you to gain deeper insights into your thought patterns, emotions, and behaviours and to implement change-focused strategies to alleviate psychological distress, diminish patterns of self-defeating behaviour and ultimately achieve a higher quality of life.
At Vital Mind Psychology, we offer a number of psychological therapies including:
Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
CBT is an evidence-based and effective time-limited therapy that is focused on achieving an understanding of your problem by examining the role of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Thoughts, feelings, and behaviours often interact in predictable patterns for specific problems. CBT allows you to quite quickly understand the particular patterns you are stuck in and then to develop strategies to begin to change these patterns.
In panic disorder, for example, one common pattern is thoughts to be hyper-focused on threat and catastrophe, overwhelming feelings of dread and heightened physical tension and behaviours that are avoidant in nature.
These three components (thoughts, feelings, behaviours) feed into one another to fuel a vicious cycle of anxiety. CBT will make clear to you how these components interact to produce and maintain your problem and what steps you need to take to begin breaking repetitive and self-defeating patterns.
Dialectical-Behavioural Therapy (DBT)
DBT is an evidence-based and effective therapy that is focused on assisting a person break out of patterns of self-defeating and self-destructive behaviours such as self-harm, binge eating, and drinking.
DBT incorporates elements of CBT as well as mindfulness (developing awareness in the present moment), strategies to tolerate distress and more effectively regulate emotions as well as deal with relationship distress.
DBT is a particularly effective therapy for individuals who struggle with regulating their emotions, experience high levels of distress in relationships and develop ineffective methods (example, over-eating, self-harm) to cope with distress.
Interpersonal and Social Rhythm Therapy (IPSRT)
IPSRT is an evidence-based and effective therapy for the treatment of bipolar disorder. Individuals with bipolar disorder are especially sensitive to disturbances to their sleep-wake cycle and dysregulation of the sleep-wake cycle reliably predicts relapsing into mania, hypomania and ultimately depression.
IPSRT focuses on the regulation of the sleep-wake cycle and addresses key variables, such as levels of interpersonal conflict/support that can lead to a dysregulation of this important biological process. Combined with medication for Bipolar disorder, IPSRT can significantly reduce the rate of relapse in Bipolar Disorder.
Add Comment