Recommendations for Digital Therapy

We offer as standard the flexibility to conduct consultations over the telephone or via video platforms, according to client needs and preferences. We follow the British Psychological Society’s recommendations for digital therapies. At any time during your care, if you would prefer to use a digital platform for sessions, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, FaceTime or WhatsApp, please do ask.

For those who have chosen to have digital sessions, please see below some brief guidelines to help make the most effective use of digital therapy. Your psychologist will be in contact with you prior to sessions to confirm details.

Please note that online therapy sessions are governed by the same ethical principles as face-to-face sessions, including confidentiality.

- Try to find an appropriate physical space for the session in advance of the meeting. Set up your phone, tablet or computer in a private room.
- If there are people in the house, let them know that you will be inaccessible for the duration of the session.
- Aim to find a quiet spot, and discourage interruptions.
- If it is possible, use headphones, or take whatever steps you can to ensure that the conversation cannot be overheard.
- Try to think of attending the session as you would in person.
- Give yourself enough time to set up, trial out the meeting link and download any necessary software.
- Please send your username or email address (as required by the platform) to your psychologist in advance of the session, and they can send an invite request to connect.

Top ten tips for mental health during social isolation

We know that isolation and reductions in social contact are associated with challenges to physical and mental health. In view of the current government advice to reduce direct social contact in order to control the spread of viruses including coronavirus Covid-19, we wanted to share a summary of evidence-based suggestions that can help mitigate the impact of these measures on your health, and to support wellbeing at this difficult time.

1. Go outside every day during daylight hours
   While following social distancing advice, including keeping two metres away from other people, it is likely to be strongly beneficial to expose yourself to daylight each day. This helps to regulate your sleep/wake cycle, to improve nighttime sleep quality and daytime energy, as well as avoiding vitamin D depletion.

2. When working from home, keep work out of the bedroom
   Ideally, we would have a dedicated space for working from home. Most importantly, do not work in bed. This is to protect your sleep, so that your body does not associate the bedroom with stress. Other forms of stressful activity such as reading news updates are also best kept out of the bedroom. If you can keep your smartphone out of the bedroom, all the better.

3. Maintain social contact
   While following guidance on maintaining social distance, it is still fundamental to human health to interact with others. Everyone has different preferences; on average, a telephone conversation does more than text messaging, and a video call does more than audio. If you live on your own, finding ways of connecting with others is likely to be even more important. When direct access to others is not an option, looking at pictures or video footage of loved ones can serve as a reminder of our connections and social support.

4. Structure your day
   Spending more time at home has the potential to remove some of the boundaries and transitions that had developed to help our assorted needs to get attended to throughout the day. If you can set times for work, fun, interaction and purposeful engagement with current affairs, this has the potential to help you feel a lot more empowered and in control, as well as helping you to get necessary things done without getting stuck in a rut of the same activity all day. Keeping a stable daily sleep/wake pattern at roughly the same time each day is likely to help the quality of your sleep, which in turn helps cognitive function and daytime energy levels.

5. Keep a “done” list
   You may or may not like to keep a “to-do” list. Research suggests that visibly evidencing the things that you have already accomplished helps to reinforce the efforts that you have been making, making it easier for those efforts to be repeated, as well as bringing a sense of achievement. Ticked off or crossed out items are much more encouraging than blank spaces where completed actions have been removed from view.

6. Help others
   Within a framework of infection control and social distancing, it is still beneficial to everyone that we support each other as a connected community. The smallest acts of consideration and support have been shown to increase wellbeing in both the giver and receiver. Local food banks and Mutual Aid groups could be helpful points of contact. Nurturing plants and caring for pets can also bring satisfaction in a similar way.

7. Ask for help when you need it
   Recognising the limits of our own capabilities and asking for support creates opportunities for others to show compassion and to remind us of the best sides of people. We are often a lot keener to help others than we feel others are keen to help us. It is worth keeping this in check, and giving people the opportunity to help. Finding ways to maintain health treatments including psychological therapy within the constraints of social distancing is also important at this time.

8. Learn something
   Whether it’s improving a language, playing an instrument or learning a new recipe, broadening your horizons and developing new skills is proven to support mental wellbeing. New learning and skills can be shared with others for extra reinforcement.

9. Do some physical exercise
   This directly boosts endorphins, which we know make you feel good, and the exercise can be chalked up on the “done” list for achievement satisfaction. Physical fitness will also boost your immune system, as cardiovascular health supports all the other systems in the body (including the brain).

10. Control the environment
    Survivors of hostage situations and of solitary confinement have reported that controlling the environment in whatever small way possible - be it as minimal as scraping the dirt from one end of a cell to another - helped them to retain a sense of self and to resist helplessness. Translated to a much less constrained situation of self-isolation at home, there are good grounds to suppose that practical interventions such as tidying, putting pictures up, moving the furniture around or doing a bit of DIY have the potential to help us retain feelings of control and mastery under difficult circumstances.