# Finally a Mental Health Professional: Need your advice!



## TyrosineKinase (Jan 20, 2010)

So after conquering most of my personal mental health issues, I finally graduated college, got a degree, and started work at a hospital.

I'm a mental health counselor at an acute stay hospital. We're one of the few in our area that accept cases such as this.

We utilize a combined individual therapy sessions with social workers/therapists and a psychiatrist.

As a mental health counselor, I run group therapy and talk to the patients one-one when there is free time. These are for both high functioning individuals (depression, teens that cut, anxiety, etc) and low functioning (psychosis, schizophrenia, etc)

Now, I am looking for advice from any of you. It doesn't have to be that you have ever been to group therapy or individual therapy (though it helps in my case), but what would you think would be most helpful for your cases.

The feedback I got from the people is that they like the high energy session, where I'm not sitting in a chair going around the room, but actually coming up with a game plan, writing things down on the board, giving out handbooks, activities that help them learn coping skills and such.

Does anyone have any advice on what I could do to better these therapeutic techniques, *where people would actually get something out of it?

*If you don't have any advice to offer, it would be good to if you can post links to *material and activities* that may be useful for such topics to discuss in terms of mental health (mental hygiene, anxiety coping, drug abuse, alternatives to hurting yourself, depression, dealing with relationships). Things that everybody high functioning person has problems with but eventually lands them in the hospital.

Thanks for the help and I really appreciate it. Have a great day.


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## Dylan2 (Jun 3, 2012)

I went through a CBT group for anxiety disorders and it made a huge difference for my social anxiety disorder. The things you described yourself doing are basically what I encountered in CBT. I thought it was particularly helpful when the therapist wrote cognitive distortions we had provided, on the board, and then discussed them with us. Of course encouraging exposure was what helped me the most with my social anxiety disorder. I actually got to experience some exposure during the sessions when I was asked if I would like to practice the speech I had to give for a university class. I gave the speech in front of the CBT group. It went well and then I ended up feeling only minimal anxiety when I had to give the speech in class.

Here are resources relevant to anxiety disorders that I generally approve of:

http://anxietyadventures.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/10-tips.jpg


http://chibird.com/post/43770659650/for-all-the-personal-emergencies-you-might-have

http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/html/mindful_with_emotions.html

There are a bunch of useful handouts in this document:

http://www.moodjuice.scot.nhs.uk/shynesssocialphobia.asp

Check out this thread for lists of alternatives to self-harm:

http://www.socialanxietysupport.com/forum/f33/self-harm-coping-mechanisms-183993/


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