Dear ACT community,
We would like to share with you a brief manual which is being developed as part of Doctorate in Clinical Psychology to help those with anxiety and/or depression.
The manual is designed to be accompanied with two therapist telephone calls to guide clients through the manual. It is a brief 58-page document that has been specifically designed to be photocopied in grey scale with ease. We are currently conducting a randomised controlled trial to invesigate the effectiveness of guided self-help, compared to a non-active control condition using this manual. Some pages are specific to a Scottish audience for this reason but please contact us if you feel it could be of some use and we can then adapt it.
The manual contains a chapter on each of the six ACT processes (present moment awareness, cognitive defusion, acceptance, self-as-context, connecting with values and committed action). It is designed so that one chapter is read each week (6 weeks in total) with behavioural tasks at the end of each chapter. It has been deemed 'fairly easy to read', with a Flesh Reading Ease Score of 69.6.
We will seek to post the results of the first study on the ACBS website as soon as they are ready.
Best wishes,
Shane Ford (shanealwynford@hotmail.com)
Co-authors: Dr David Gillanders (david.gillanders@ac.ed.uk)