Mindfulness and Psychosis – BABCP 2008

At the 2008 BABCP National Conference held in Edinburgh, Amy McArthur, Gordon Mitchell and I led a half-day workshop on “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Psychosis”.

The workshop represented a distillation of our understanding of the field currently, and some of the clinical methods that we use for running groups and doing individual therapy in our services.

A description of the workshop is below:

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a contextual CBT that uses mindfulness and values-based behavioural activation strategies to help people develop a workable relationship with internal experiences as part of a direction of increasing life meaning and vitality. ACT involves an experiential approach to therapy, based upon empirical principles of behaviour change. Clients are guided through exercises and metaphors to develop a present moment focus, clarify personal values and explore the functional utility of coping strategies. There has been promising evidence to suggest ACT can help people who are distressed and/or disabled by psychosis to learn a mindful and accepting stance toward unusual experiences, reducing the impact of symptoms, and improving social functioning (Bach & Hayes 2002; Gaudiano & Herbert, 2006). This workshop will present an ACT approach to psychosis, including how the problems of psychosis are conceptualised in this model and modifications to mindfulness and acceptance techniques for this population.

We had excellent attendance for the workshop and it was obvious that a fair number of CBT therapists have an interest in mindfulness and ACT approaches for helping people distressed and disabled by psychosis.

There is a description of the workshop available here (on the contextualpsychology.org website). On the same page is the workshop handout, as well as the audiorecordings of the presentations.

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