About Our Live Online Classes

Are they suitable for me?

The answer is YES if …

• you are experiencing symptoms of a common mental health concern such as stress, anxiety, worry, sleep issues, depression, low mood, or lack of motivation
• you want to understand more about why you are feeling the way you are and learn way to overcome this
• you are feeling motivated to make changes to improve how you feel
• you have access to the internet
• you have not also made a referral to us, already engaging in an online group, you are not waiting for or engaging with one of our other therapies

How do the classes help?

• They are based on guided self-help cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) – an effective therapy for treating depression and anxiety symptoms. You will learn how your thoughts, feelings, behaviours and physical symptoms and how these interact and impact you emotional wellbeing. The classes are run by qualified psychological wellbeing practitioners
• These are psychoeducational classes, not group therapy – you will be watching, listening, and learning about your mental health and ways to improve it, and encouraged to make changes outside of the classes to improve how you feel

How does it all work?

• Same time and place (online) – the sessions run online as a Microsoft Teams Live Event, at the same day and time consecutively each week. You don't need an account, you can simply join using the link we send you each week. 
• We monitor your progress – we want to make sure that everybody is benefiting from the classes, and so each week you will be required to answer a set of mood measure questionnaires prior to the session. You will be sent a reminder by text 48 hours before the session to log in and complete these online, and once complete you receive your weekly session link and workbook. For more information on these measures please see below.
• Session Links & Workbooks – following you completing you will receive a link to each session and a workbook which covers what was taught and helps you to put the learning into practice
• The classes are completely confidential – you have no camera or mic on during the session, but we encourage you to speak with us through a live chat at the side of the screen (and in the chat you use whichever name you like – it can be your first name a nickname, an initial, or you can be anonymous)
• What if I don’t feel better? - You need to make a change to see a change! Therefore, we would encourage you to attend all sessions and put into practice the techniques taught. However, if at the end of the group classes we feel you may need a little further support, you will automatically be offered an appointment with one of our psychological wellbeing practitioners after a few weeks. We will assess whether we feel you need further support using you mood measure questionnaires, or you can also get in touch to let us know.

More About the Questionnaires

These are nationally set questionnaires which we are required to gather as a mental health service. They look at very common symptoms of anxiety and low mood that we all experience form time to time. Please note that they do not indicate any mental illness. The questionnaires help us and yourself to monitor your progress throughout your treatment with us, and let us know if you benefit from the treatment and if you want require some more support. 

How is your data used?

LMWS work together and observe the NHS Code of Practice on confidentiality.   We work in the same way and use a single, secure, electronic patient records system which is approved nationally by NHS England. For attendees to our groups, we are required to create a treatment record in order for us to report to NHS England on how many people are accessing our service.  The reports only include statistics, for example about the numbers of patients attending, or the degree of symptoms reported by attendees. No information that could reveal a patients identity is used in any of these reports and your record on our system is closed once the workshop is finished (unless you go on to, or are already receiving further treatment with us). 

Your Safety 

It is very common to have distressing thoughts when feeling overwhelmed. One of the questions therefore asks about “thoughts to harm yourself or end your life”, which is just as common as all of the other symptoms listed. We require you to answer this question, so please do not leave it blank. We assume that all attendees are able to keep themselves safe and will not follow up on this question. If you would like to talk to somebody, please get in touch.

Having these thoughts is different from making plans or having intentions to act on them, and if you feel you may be at risk you can find sources of support at: https://www.mindwell-leeds.org.uk/i-need-help-now#/

The Depression Recovery 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.