THERAPY FOR INDIVIDUALS

While all of us feel down sometimes, there is a point at which low mood begins to get in the way of living a fulfilling life. This may take the form of persistently low mood or an inability to experience joy. It may be a more intermittent, severe depression that occurs once in a while and which results in a withdrawal from life and one’s relationships. It may be a bipolar depression that features periods of very high energy, impulsivity, and sometimes irritability.

Treatment for depression almost always involves some aspect of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which will help you to change your thoughts and behaviours in order to improve your mood, but it might also involve integrating Insight-Oriented Therapy to look at aspects of your childhood and early relationships that might be relevant.

Generalized Anxiety

People with generalized anxiety experience persistent worry across multiple areas (money, work, relationships, health). They’ll often report that they’ve always been “a worrier”, or have always felt tense, and will sometimes refer to it as being part of their personality. Often as one specific worry recedes, another comes to the forefront, making it seem that the anxiety is a moving target that can never be resolved.

Social Anxiety

Social Anxiety Disorder is persistent anxiety about social situations and fear of being negatively evaluated by others. This anxiety can be related to performing in any way in public, from socializing, to presenting at work, to eating in public, to raising one’s hand in a classroom setting. There is often a “snowball effect” where anxiety about the anxiety develops, and this is precisely what therapy helps to interrupt.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

OCD involves unwanted and disturbing thoughts, images, or urges (obsessions) that intrude into one’s mind and cause a great deal of anxiety, which one then tries to reduce by engaging in repetitive behaviours or mental acts (compulsions). People suffering with OCD are well aware that their compulsions are problematic, but they struggle to overcome them. The usual treatment for OCD is a specific type of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

Panic

For people whose anxiety manifests as panic, the world can become a very frightening place. Panic attacks involve bouts of anxiety so severe and physical that a person might think that they are having a heart attack. Often a person who experiences panic attacks will begin to anticipate future panic attacks, and this can set a cycle in motion. If left untreated, panic can lead to agoraphobia, a condition in which a person avoids leaving their home or safe place in order to avoid experiencing panic symptoms.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Sometimes in the aftermath of a traumatic experience, people develop intrusive memories or images of the trauma, and are chronically on high alert. In this way, a person with PTSD essentially ends up reliving the traumatic event over and over. People with PTSD can experience emotional numbness, hypervigilance, difficulty sleeping, irritability, and persistent negative thoughts about the world and their future. They cope by avoiding anything that reminds them of the event, and as a result their life can become quite limited. Therapy for PTSD is often delivered using Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT).

While stress is a normal part of life, there can be times when our usual methods of coping are stretched to their limit. It might result from a string of stressors that come so close together that we don’t have sufficient time to recover from one and prepare for the next. Or maybe it’s just too many uncontrollable things in our environment that leads us to realize that we are burned out. Therapy for stress and burn-out typically combines instruction in stress-management and Relaxation Training, and might incorporate aspects of Insight-Oriented Therapy aimed at addressing other factors (e.g., assertiveness, boundary-setting, perfectionism, self-esteem issues) that might be contributing to one’s distress.