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Physical Health and Mental Health
People with severe mental illness have a life expectancy of 10-25 years less than those without. (Figures from the World Health Organisation.) The premature deaths are mostly from chronic physical conditions (for example cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases or diabetes) and suicide.
These courses have been specially selected to help those meeting or working with people with severe mental illness in any setting, to ensure the most is made from opportunities for engagement and building a therapeutic alliance, around lifestyle factors and physical health issues, monitoring of medication side-effects and recognising and acting on risk around suicide. (In keeping with a Making Every Contact Count - MECC philosophy and prevention of ill health and health equality strategy.)
CBT Essentials (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy).
A 3-day course. (Online version also available.)
The UK's favourite introduction to this powerful, evidence-based technique.
Now in its latest form this course has introduced Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to thousands of people in the UK ever since 1983. It addresses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in a way that you can use after the course. It covers: the history and meaning of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, conceptualising cases in CBT terms, the format of a standard CBT session, and the most important CBT techniques. All in a way that applies it constantly to practical examples.
CBT Plus, for lifestyle issues affecting mental and physical wellbeing.
A 3-day course.
This course describes an organised way of helping people to recognise their lifestyle problems and to do something about them.
Principally it addresses behaviour about which the client has mixed feelings: drinking and substance misuse for example, and a whole array of issues relating to common mental and physical health problems as well. Issues from taking psychoactive medication through to, in particular, sleeping, exercising and eating more healthily can all be addressed actively and constructively.
SFT Essentials (Solution-Focused Therapy).
Also known as SFBT (Solution-Focused Brief Therapy).
A 3-day course.
An approach to problems that is fundamentally positive and comes as a breath of fresh air to professionals and clients alike.
Another of APT's top courses, this aims to introduce you to the principles of SFT / SFBT in a way that gives you a firm grasp of them and enables you to use them in a safe and helpful way. You should become at home with the approach which is often seen as a 'breath of fresh air' both to client and professional, looking for and finding effective solutions for problems, rather than being sucked further and further into the problem itself.
10-minute CBT: The BITS™ Course.
A 2-day course.
Many of the best professionals working in mental health and related fields rarely sit down for formal 45 minute sessions with their clients. Rather, the way they work is much more suited to informal interactions lasting a few minutes and taking place as and when it is convenient. Unfortunately, sometimes these interactions rarely get beyond the "How are things going?" stage. The BITS 10-minute therapy approach takes the view that many clients value these occasional, brief and informal interactions very highly. Hence the BITS 10-minute approach has been developed as an interface between the majority of professionals who need to work this way and the majority of clients who rather like this way of working.
Suicide Awareness.
A half-day course.
This short course is designed to raise your awareness of the importance of suicide and inform you about some of the key questions. Specifically:
• Why is it important to know about suicide?
• How many people take their own lives?
• What effect does suicide have on friends and family?
• Why do people take their own lives?
• Are there any signs that someone is contemplating suicide?
• If you think someone is contemplating suicide, what can you do about it?
• If you have been affected by someone's suicide, what can you do to help yourself?
• What are the best ways to lead a more rewarding life?
Suicide-Risk Assessment & Management.
A 2-day course.
Thousands of people take their own lives every year, and we don't respond to it especially well: around 90% of people who end their own lives have seen their doctors in the previous year. We need to be able to spot those who are at risk, to manage the risk, and intervene to help people build a worthwhile life long-term.
This 2-day course focuses on the first two of those three factors, and is based on APT's acclaimed DICES programme for risk assessment and management. It focuses purely on the risk of suicide, and does so in a client-focused way, designed to help the client from the very first moment of contact. It covers:
1. Risk Assessment
2. Risk Management
3. How to verify and demonstrate you have assessed and managed risk
The course aims also to help us become relaxed and optimistic about seeing suicidal people, because we will know what to do: we will notice them, we will be able to manage their suicidality, we will be able to plan effective treatment.
Using your existing skills to work effectively with Suicidality.
A 2-day course.
Working with people who are considering suicide is qualitatively different from working with depression for example, rather like rescuing someone who is drowning is different from teaching someone to swim. And yet most clinicians don't want to learn a complete new set of skills that they only use when they are working with suicidality, they want to adapt their pre-existing skills in an effective way. If you are amongst those many clinicians, then this 2-day course is for you.
This course aims for you to become relaxed and optimistic about seeing suicidal people, because you will know how to give them hope, and how to deliver as well as possible on that hope.
CBT Plus, for Suicide Prevention.
A 3-day course.
There is more to working with suicidality than risk assessment and management, and having mastered those, we need then to be able to help people to build lives that are much more rewarding. It is unrealistic to think we can create lives that are completely free of suffering, but perfectly realistic to help create lives that are worth suffering for. And this 3-day course strives to achieve just that.
Some professionals become anxious about seeing patients who are suicidal, so what this course aims to do is to help us become relaxed and optimistic about seeing suicidal people, because we will know how to give them hope, and how to deliver as well as possible on that hope.
