Depression Recovery 

Important Information

All of our group classes are now running online, and how we monitor your progress is online too. You are required to complete a mood measure questionnaire prior to each session. You will receive a text reminder and link to the questionnaires 48 hours before your session starting. You must complete your online questionnaires at least 2 hours before each session of your group to receive an invite.  

Amy, our of our class facilitators, walks you through completing the questionnaires and joining the group online in this short video...

The Classes

This course helps us to identify how our depression is maintained by negative and unhelpful thoughts and withdrawal and avoidance behaviour. The course teaches CBT interventions to help overcome depression, including: improving your sleep, tackling avoidance, recognising and challenging negative thinking and problem solving.

Week one: Introduction and first steps

We will cover the most common signs and symptoms of depression and look at some case studies to illustrate this. We will also introduce CBT and start to look at how we get trapped in vicious cycles by looking at the 5 areas assessment. Finally we will look at getting a better nights sleep.

Week two: Depression and our behaviour Part one

We will start to look at how your behaviour may have changed since becoming depressed, and how changes such as avoidance and putting things off can then feed back into the depression and keep it going. We introduce the first technique of the course, behavioural activation, and discuss how it can help us break the cycle of avoidance by starting to gradually plan in activities.

Week three: Depression and our behaviour Part two

This week focuses on how we can keep behavioural  activation going by continuing to gradually add in more activities. We also introduce two new techniques which could help us with behavioural activation: a practical problem solving approach to help us kick start our natural problem solving abilities, and refocussing which can help us to stop ruminating and fully engage in the activities we are doing.

Week four: Depression and our thoughts Part one

We turn our attention to the role of our thoughts this week, gaining an understanding of the role negative thoughts play in maintaining our depression. We introduce a technique to help us to identify these negative automatic thoughts and we discuss a number of common thinking errors.

Week five: Depression and our thoughts Part two

Now we have learnt to identify our negative automatic thoughts, this week we cover a technique called thought challenging which helps us to start to challenge these thoughts and change the way we think about situations. We learn how to question if these thoughts are accurate and come up with alternative balanced ways of thinking.

Week six: Maintaining progress

In the final session of the course we start to make a plan about how we can maintain and build upon the progress we have made so far. We re-cap all the of the interventions covered in the course and discuss next steps.