CBT for mild to moderate depression and anxiety: a guide to low-intensity interventions

Abstract

Do you, as a health care practitioner or trainee health care practitioner, ever experience frustration with your work in helping people? Do you ever feel getting to grips with client problems is difficult and complex? Do you sometimes suffer that ‘heart sink’ moment when you are overwhelmed with a mountain of client assessment data but struggle to knit it all together? If you answer yes to any of these questions, you are in good company and this book is designed to help you by introducing some interventions that will enhance your therapeutic skills, help you engage more effectively with your clients and help you organize your therapeutic interventions in a much more systematic way. The inspiration for this book has been the extraordinary advances in the treatment of mental illness since the 1980s which make this moment in time one of the most exciting periods in the mental health field’s history. Behavioural and cognitive behavioural treatment techniques, often together referred to as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), have had a considerable impact on the delivery of effective treatments for those suffering from common mental health problems. A review of meta- analyses indicates cognitive behavioural interventions offer an effective treatment option for those suffering from anxiety and depression (Butler et al., 2006)