About Therapies
I have put in this short page as a guidance because a lot of people over a long time have explained to me that deciding on a "therapy" is a difficult matter. There are a lot of "therapies". They are not all clear about what they offer. In fact, if a therapy were too strong on guarantees, you and I wouldn't trust it anyway!I follow the implications of research being conducted by Professor David Winter and colleagues at Edgware Hospital [I can supply references if you are interested. They have looked into the things which influence people when they are making their decision about therapies]. Broadly speaking the choices lie between two broad approaches. Firstly, there are therapies which instruct and have a sort of educational [sometimes called psycho-educational] input as well. These are therapies which have an active homework component which is often as much as anything 'prescribed'. Into this first group of therapies I would place Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The second group of therapies centre around a more creative element where the responses to the therapy [in both cases talking with a therapist, sometimes a Computer] are more of your own. You use your own language to shape up how it is that you would like to proceed. Such therapies often leave quite a lot of the action to the meeting itself in contradistinction to the first group where the majority emphasis is upon work you do outside of the meeting. This second group of therapies often uses language of your own shaping to do the work. Quite often you will 'talk' your way through to feeling differently. In the first style described, you will act and think your way through to feeling differently.
It needs to be said that the first group, that's the one including the Cognitive Behavioural approach, are researched more quantitatively. That is to say, there is better statistical evidence that they work. However, they often start out from a sharper definition of a trouble or symptom. Things like Anger, Depression, Anxiety, Self Harm, all feature strongly and they can often be represented by belonging to a "Disorder" or similar such label. You have probably heard of such things as Generalised Anxiety Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Panic Disorder and so on. Because they have such features these therapies are the ones which you will find on the official sites now being produced by national verifying agencies such as the Institute for Clinical Excellence. There are some sites listed below.
In the second group, we find such things as Personal Construct Therapy. In fact there are some sites for that as well and although Personal Construct Therapy is an approach less likely to operate from the starting point of a definite label they have gone some way to producing definitions. There's a marvellous site which gives a dictionary of all the terms and approaches involved [See below].
So, the guidance here is that you should consider whether or not you wish:
Having said all these things, please don't think for a moment that these definitions are absolute. They aren't and you can end up doing "homework" in type of therapy where you didn't expect to and talking stuff in another where you didn't expect to.
Sites you may like to visit to see what people say about troubles and how to help them:
http://www.psychcentral.com
this site has some splendid informational resources
http://mentalhelp.net
has materials that are of a serious nature appealing to professional and non professional alike
If you like to know a bit more about treatment guidelines, there are two sites which offer careful advice:
http://www.doh.gov.uk/mentalhealth/treatmentguideline
http://www.nice.org.uk/Tap Here
A keyword for a Personal Construct Therapy site is:
"PCP Encylopaedia". Just tap that into your Search Engine.
Also, very sound is the 'Mental Health Foundation' which comes up high in Google
If you would like to get in touch by email then Tap Here and allow a little time!
