You probably will not be surprised the hear that no two sessions are the same, individuals are unique, and effective therapy needs to be tailored to in individuals situation and personal recovery journey. That said there are some common components to therapy for depression.
Initial depression therapy session.
- Once you book a session, emailing you a basic welcome letter. The welcome letter will provide information on finding the office, contact details, administration and payment details, and a few sentences about our first session.
- In the waiting room, completing some brief psychological measures to get a baseline before we start our work together. The common ones I use are:
- a short measure of depression, anxiety and stress
- an ultra-brief session-by-session assessment of areas of life functioning known to change as a result of therapeutic intervention
- a brief measure of valued living
- a brief measure of psychological flexibility (the main ingredient of ACT).
- Initially covering confidentiality, administration and billing and checking to see if you have any questions.
- What brought you to therapy (presenting issue) and clarifying what symptoms, such as depression that may be a concern.
- Collaboratively developing clear and realistic goals therapy. It is more effective to set behavioural goals (for example I want to go out socially with my friends once a week) rather than symptom reduction goals (for example I want to feel less lethargic).
- Getting to know each other – to build trust.
- A quick tour of your life – relationship with your parents, school experiences, salient experiences during childhood, adolescent and adulthood. Helpful to put your presenting issue in some wider context.
- Exploring together a recent example of the presenting issue. Applying what we learnt together from the tour of your life, to make sense of how the presenting issue is playing out in your life.
- Identifying what skills and experiences are needed to help you achieve your therapy goals.
- Agreeing on some skills and exercises to experiment with between now and next session.
- End the session by completing a brief measure of the effectiveness of the therapeutic relationship and discussing what to do differently in the next session.
Subsequent depression therapy sessions
- To gauge progress (therapy effectiveness), complete the same brief measures for progress on goals, life functioning, valued living, and psychological flexibility. Discuss what the measures are telling us about therapy effectiveness so far.
- Debrief on the skills and exercises you experimented with between sessions
- Choose a focus for the session, informed by progress to date.
- Explore a resent real-life example of a challenging situation and experiment with applying different ACT skills to what is happening in the session
- Identifying what further skills and experiences are needed to help you achieve your therapy goals.
- Agreeing on some skills and exercises to experiment with between now and next session.
- End the session by completing a brief measure of the effectiveness of the therapeutic relationship and discussing what to do differently in the next session.
