Assessment and Treatment

Assessment

Your first appointment will focus on defining the nature of your concerns, taking a personal history of life events and patterns that may have contributed to these problems/issues, and determining what further assessment and/or treatment you may need. You may be asked to fill out some questionnaires before your first appointment and to bring them with you to your first appointment. At the end of the assessment session you will be presented with recommendations for treatment.

Treatment

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for most problems/issues involves 8-20 sessions of individual, couple or group psychotherapy.

In CBT you will meet with your therapist for approximately an hour a week. At the beginning of treatment you will discuss your current problems and goals for treatment. After you and your therapist establish goals for treatment, you will spend your sessions learning techniques for challenging your symptoms and changing your behaviour.

CBT is much more than “talk therapy.” In addition to talking to your therapist about your problems, you will be asked to do homework each week. The amount of homework varies but typically consist of ½ hour to 1 hour per day of some combination of monitoring your symptoms, monitoring your thoughts, challenging your assumptions and beliefs and experimenting with new behaviour. In CBT your therapist acts as a “coach” who helps you to learn a variety of techniques that will help you to approach your problems in new ways.

As you learn to employ CBT techniques, you gradually require less contact with your therapist. However, at the beginning of therapy it is important to meet once per week in order to get some momentum going. Once you have some momentum going and you are becoming confident with the techniques the time between appointments is often increased to once every two weeks or once per month.

Group Treatment Program

We offer group treatment for panic disorder/agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder (social phobia), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). In group treatment a small number of people (4-8) with similar problems and concerns meet for 8-16 weeks of group CBT. Most groups meet for 8-16 sessions. Group sessions are usually longer than 50 minutes.