Learning Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

LEARNING ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY

The Essential Guide to the
Process and Practice of Mindful Psychiatry

REVIEWS

REVIEWS

Every psychiatrist, in every type of workplace, needs this book. It’s a truly practical step-by-step guide to enriching and enhancing your clinical practice with acceptance and commitment therapy. It addresses the full range of biopsychosocial concerns that psychiatrists regularly deal with, through a simple but empowering transdiagnostic approach. If you want to help your patients live richer, fuller lives while effectively handling their painful thoughts, feelings, emotions and memories, you need this text!

Russ Harris, MBBS

Author of ACT Made Simple, and the international best-seller, The Happiness Trap

An important, timely and well-written resource for psychiatrists who would like to engage in or who engage in formal Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. This text provides a clarity of conceptualization and a review of techniques that will prove extremely useful to psychiatric residents to seasoned practitioners in multiple clinical settings or clinical presentations.

Cheryl Chessick, M.D., DFAPA

Psychiatrist, NW Permanente

ACT is a notable and influential innovation in the psychotherapies – this accessible text provides a broad ranging and accessible grounding in ACT theory and techniques for psychiatrists, with access to media resources and including careful consideration of adaptation for specific psychiatric care settings. It should be valuable for practitioners working alongside others using ACT, referring to ACT practitioners, or to those wishing to make use of ACT principles in differing ways in their own practice. For psychiatry to remain engaged with wider mental health care, and properly effective, psychiatrists must take opportunities to inform themselves as psychotherapeutic techniques develop; in regard to ACT, this text is a valuable new resource.

Graham Meadows, FRANZCP.

Monash University and the University of Melbourne

This book is essential reading and an indispensable addition for all psychiatrists wishing to enhance their knowledge and skills of ACT, a leading edge and novel psychological treatment. It is conveniently divided up into three sections, describing the background of ACT, its delivery and its application in clinical practice. Each chapter is clearly written, summarised and benefits from clinical examples detailing how an ACT approach may be used.

Particular strengths include an explanation of the difficult principles of relational frame theory, the problems associated with adherence to literal meaning of words and understanding the contextual nature of behaviors. The second section is a broad piece of work and includes a description of standard ACT processes, ways to help engage patients, and the use of advanced ACT methods. The chapter on how to promote willingness to consider medication as an adjunct to treatment is indispensable for the working psychiatrist. The third section fills the gap on how ACT may be applied to different clinical settings and how trainee psychiatrists may gain further expertise in ACT.
 
This whole package benefits from a collection of video clips. This work will become one of the basic ACT texts for clinical psychiatrists.

Marc Serfaty

Associate Professor, University College of London, and Consultant in Psychiatry