Recently, with my colleague Joe Oliver, we presented our work (at the ACT Summer Institute IV) on developing acceptance and commitment therapy to help young people recovering from a first episode of psychosis. We titled our presentation “ACT Early”, and described the work we have been doing in developing groups and individual therapy for this population.

Conference Abstract:

The stance of acceptance and committed action may allow for flexibility in response to persisting psychotic experiences, as has been suggested in ACT studies with the seriously mentally ill (Bach & Hayes, 2002; Gaudiano & Herbert, 2006). There is also the exciting potential for researching the impact of ACT in the early phase of psychosis – helping first episode clients to recover from psychosis through the development of a more mindful approach toward unusual experiences and critical appraisals, and committing to values-based actions.

More specifically, the use of ACT may:

[1] foster the development of a psychologically flexible stance toward anomalous experiences,

[2] enable a “values-based” recovery,

[3] reduce the impact of “fear of recurrence” of psychosis through development of mindfulness and self as context,

[4] enable individuals to notice the process of self-stigmatisation, contexts where this operates as a barrier, and commit to valued directions in the face of these appraisals, and

[5] improve relapse prevention plans through the use of mindfulness and committed action.

We describe a group program we have developed, as well as individual work with young people who have experienced a first episode of psychosis. In addition there is discussion about a pilot ACT/mindfulness group for people experiencing at risk mental states, who may be in a prodromal phase of psychosis.

The .pdf of this workshop is here: act-early-morris-oliver-2008 and the audio recording of our presentation is here (.mp3 format, 30MB download)