Our Philosophy

Our commitment to clients is to provide the highest quality in care, using only evidence-based therapeutic techniques. Our theoretical approaches include cognitive behaviour, interpersonal, and schema therapy. Cognitive behaviour therapy means that treatment involves changing thoughts and behaviours to influence and improve how you feel. Interpersonal psychotherapy means identifying and changing difficulties connected with relationships.

Schema therapy means identifying long term problematic patterns and their origins, and helping you change the thoughts, feelings and behaviours connected to them.

Numerous clinical research studies have supported the effectiveness of cognitive behaviour therapy for the treatment of depression, anxiety disorders, chronic pain, and bulimia nervosa. It has also been found to help in reducing relapse rates in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. It is on the basis of these research studies that cognitive behaviour therapy is considered state of the art and is widely viewed as the most effective psychological treatment for many psychological problems (for more details, visit the "Resources" page of this website). This evidence basis distinguishes cognitive behaviour therapy from other forms of psychological treatments.

Interpersonal psychotherapy has also been found to be effective by a large number of studies for the treatment of long term depression. It works by helping people change their relationships and their thoughts and feelings about their relationships, and this improves people's long term well being and reduces their depression. Research into the treatment of psychological problems which people have had all their life is still limited, but there is some research supporting schema therapy. Also, schema therapy is based on cognitive behaviour therapy and we can therefore trust it more than approaches based on other forms of psychological treatments.

What this means is that we only use treatments and approaches that are shown to be effective by scientific research and are viewed as best practice. What makes our philosophy different is that we do not use a variety of therapy techniques in an "eclectic" approach to treatment. Rather than knowing a little bit about a lot of different treatments (many of which are not supported by research) our approach is to specialise in cognitive behaviour therapy, interpersonal psychotherapy and schema therapy.

In addition, although we are able to provide a service for most psychological problems, we have additional specialised training in particular areas. These are: depression, anxiety and chronic pain (short and long term), child and adolescent mental health, and relationship problems. This means that we have more in depth training and experience in these areas and can therefore provide a more specialised service in these areas than another "generalist" psychologist could.

We also believe in the importance of disseminating information to the general public and that people should have free and easy access to evidence-based resources. That is why we have created a resource library (accessible through our "Resources" page) with a wealth of downloadable, free information sheets.