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Psycholgist Dr Sarah Edelman examines perfectionism, and how it makes life difficult:

On ABC nightlife Sarah Edelman explains how trying too hard, trying to be a perfectionist can make your life more difficult. You can listen to the mp3 audio here

Dr Sarah Edelman discusses Mindfulness Meditation on ABC Nightlife

Psychologist Sarah Edelman talks about meditation and how meditation and especially mindfulness meditation can help to solve some of life's problems. Meditation is a practice that has been around for thousands of years. You can listen to the program here

Dr Sarah Edelman at the University of NSW Euthanasia debate

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome discussed with Dr Sarah Edelman Phd

Sarah Edelman psychologist discusses on ABC nightlife evidence of solutions to chronic fatigue syndrome, You can listen to the Audio here

Talking Empathy with Dr Sarah Edelman Phd

Psychologist Sarah Edelman talked on ABC local radio Nightlife on the subject of empathy . How to put yourself in other peoples circumstance. You can hear here at the ABC website here

Psychologist Sarah Edelman Phd about staying in contact with being optimistic

Sarah Edelman has spoken about staying optimistic in small business in the SMH website here

She has tips for staying optimistic:

TIPS FOR CULTIVATING OPTIMISM

1. Reframe your thinking so that whenever you face a challenge, ask yourself: 'How can I learn or grow from this experience, regardless of the outcome?'

2. Whenever you make a business decision, consider all the benefits of making the decision – include material, personal, social and community benefits. The more benefits the greater the motivation for stepping out of your comfort zone.

3. Be realistic about the obstacles, problems and challenges that you face along the way - if you try and pretend they are not there, you are setting yourself up for failure.

4. Stop worrying: it is a huge time-waster, it can eat up hours, days, months, even years. Put a plan in place for the worst-case scenarios and then put worry aside and focus on things you can control.

5. If you maintain a practice of optimism, your antennas will be raised for more optimism and you will be exposed to more opportunities.

6. If you are struggling to maintain optimism in your business and life in general, it may be useful to consult a counsellor or psychologist to help you develop a healthy positive mindset.

Social Contact - Sarah Edelman Phd at the Happiness and its causes conference

Dr Sarah Edelman spoke at the Happiness and its causes conference covering issues such as:

• What is the nature of depression?
• Recognising the symptoms of depression – in yourself and others
• How does one’s thinking style and personality influence the risk of developing depression?
• What types of faulty thinking and behaviour sustain depression?
• Cognitive and behavioural strategies for relieving depression

You can read more at the website here and contact the organisers

Dr Sarah Edelman Phd talks about feeling disconnected

Dr Sarah Edelman Phd talked on ABC Radio Nightlife to Tony Delroy. Loneliness is not something many of us are willing to admit to and despite many of us increasingly becoming more connected through social media, social isolation and social contact is startlingly common. you can hear her talk at the ABC website here

Dr Sarah Edelman Phd on how to deal with difficult people

Sarah Edelman spoke on ABC Radio program Nightlife with Tony Delroy. We all have difficult people in our lives, whether it is our mother, brother, neighbour or local shopkeeper. It's a rare life that is untouched by at least one difficult person - for some of us it is a daily reality. Clinical Psychologist Dr Sarah Edelman joins the program to offer her advice on how to best live with it. You can hear the program again at the ABC website here.

Sarah Edelman Phd on Misguided Love

Dr Sarah Edelman was on ABC Radio Nightlife with Tony Delroy in May 2011. Dr Sarah Edelman joins the program to discuss what to do when you become so obsessed with someone that you can't get them out of your head - a condition often referred to as "misguided love" or "irrational attraction". You can listen to the program at the ABC website here.

 

Sarah Edelman Phd on ABC radio

Sarah Edelman was interviewed by Richard Glover on Midweek conference in May 2011. We all need to calm our minds sometimes, free ourselves of the stresses and obsessions that can persist in our thoughts.

Often we try to ignore them or think of something else, but psychologists are increasingly telling us that concentrating on the problem can be more helpful. here the full interview here at the ABC website

Sarah Edelman Phd in the SMH

Sarah Edelma was contacted by the Sydney Morning Herald in July 2003 about Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. They also interviews some people who had undertaken CBT therapy. You can read the article here. at the SMH website

Sarah Edelman Phd Change Your Thinking

Sarah Edelman Phd Australian Psychologist wore a book in 2007 called "Change Your Thinking". Dr. Sarah Edelman has chosen Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) as a practical, effective way to help you overcome stress, anxiety and depression, and improve your life. Very few people can seriously assert that they've never experienced some stress, anxiety and at least some form of depression, and most of us would like to improve our lives, so this would seem to be an Important Book.

Since all systems come with their fair share of insiders jargon, you will not be surprised that in order to get in the swing of CBT, you will need to ingest some new unconventional vocabulary. Central to the functions of CBT are the terms "awfulize" and "catastrophize," denoting our tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of any given situation then to leap to the worst possible conclusions. This negative way of assimilating life's events can lead to paralyzing frustration, especially if you have LFT (low frustration tolerance). The author postulates that many modern Americans have LFT owing to having been spoiled rotten (my terminology) as children - in other words, never or rarely ever having had to endure anything much worse than a traffic jam, a barking dog or a sticking cabinet door. Otherwise intelligent people with LFT can rapidly make the mental leap from traffic jam to late to work, loss of job, loss of income, poverty, disgrace and death in a ditch. And it's all someone else's fault. Long before you succumb to such negative thinking, Dr. Edelman will teach you to "identify and challenge anger producing cognitions," such as "I should always be treated fairly," "I shouldn't be inconvenienced," or, "other people should always do what I think is right." One method for isolating and combating such cognitions is to posit logical statements such as, "It's nice when things go well for me... but hassles are a part of life."

Since everyone is, as noted above, prone to some negative thinking and reactive behavior patterns that serve to make situations worse, this book could be a useful guide for all of us. But it will be more helpful to those who are struggling with structural life challenges such as relationship crashes, unmanageable grief, or unsociable anger. For such sufferers, there are handy assessment tools, charts and written exercises. CBT does not require wholesale "positive thinking." It allows you to grade yourself on the curve, acknowledging that for a very depressed person, just being able to think "today wasn't a total disaster" may represent great progress. Overall, though, CBT does require its practitioners to have faith that negative cognitions, whatever their source, can be recognized, understood and over-ridden. Change Your Thinking comes with an important proviso: the book is no substitute for therapy. People with serious mental illness will need more than a self-help guide.

Mental Health Links Website Contact:

www.blackdoginstitute.org.au
www.beyondblue.org.au
www.bluepages.anu.edu.au
www.depressionet.org.au
www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au

www.sane.org

About CBT - Cognitive behavioral therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy (or cognitive behavioral therapies or CBT) is a psychotherapeutic approach that aims to solve problems concerning dysfunctional emotions, behaviors and cognitions through a goal-oriented, systematic procedure. The title is used in diverse ways to designate behavior therapy, cognitive therapy, and to refer to therapy based upon a combination of basic behavioral and cognitive research.

There is empirical evidence that CBT is effective for the treatment of a variety of problems, including mood, anxiety, personality, eating, substance abuse, and psychotic disorders. Treatment is often manualized, with specific technique-driven brief, direct, and time-limited treatments for specific psychological disorders. CBT is used in individual therapy as well as group settings, and the techniques are often adapted for self-help applications. Some clinicians and researchers are more cognitive oriented , while others are more behaviorally oriented .

CBT was primarily developed through a merging of behavior therapy with cognitive therapy. While rooted in rather different theories, these two traditions found common ground in focusing on the "here and now", and on alleviating symptoms. Many CBT treatment programs for specific disorders have been evaluated for efficacy and effectiveness; the health-care trend of evidence-based treatment, where specific treatments for symptom-based diagnoses are recommended, has favored CBT over other approaches such as psychodynamic treatments. In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence recommends CBT as the treatment of choice for a number of mental health difficulties, including post-traumatic stress disorder, OCD, bulimia nervosa and clinical depression, and for the neurological condition chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis.

CBT includes a variety of approaches and therapeutic systems; some of the most well known include cognitive therapy, rational emotive behavior therapy and multimodal therapy. Defining the scope of what constitutes a cognitive–behavioral therapy is a difficulty that has persisted throughout its development. The particular therapeutic techniques vary within the different approaches of CBT according to the particular kind of problem issues, but commonly may include keeping a diary of significant events and associated feelings, thoughts and behaviors; questioning and testing cognitions, assumptions, evaluations and beliefs that might be unhelpful and unrealistic; gradually facing activities which may have been avoided; and trying out new ways of behaving and reacting. Relaxation, mindfulness and distraction techniques are also commonly included. Cognitive behavioral therapy is often also used in conjunction with mood stabilizing medications to treat conditions like bipolar disorder.

Going through cognitive behavioral therapy generally is not an overnight process for clients. Even after clients have learned to recognize when and where their mental processes go awry, it can in some cases take considerable time or effort to replace a dysfunctional cognitive-affective-behavioral process or habit with a more reasonable and adaptive one.

Anxiety disorders

A basic concept in CBT treatment of anxiety disorders is in vivo exposure—a gradual exposure to the actual, feared stimulus. This treatment is based on the theory that the fear response has been classically conditioned and that avoidance positively reinforces and maintains that fear. Through exposure to the stimulus, this conditioning can be unlearned; this is referred to as extinction and habituation. A specific phobia, such as fear of spiders, can often be treated with in vivo exposure and therapist modeling in one session. Obsessive compulsive disorder is typically treated with exposure with response prevention.

CBT has been shown to be effective in the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder, and possibly more effective than pharmacological treatments in the long term. In fact, one study of patients undergoing benzodiazepine withdrawal who had a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder showed that those who received CBT had a very high success rate of discontinuing benzodiazepines compared to those who did not receive CBT. This success rate was maintained at 12 month follow up. Furthermore in patients who had discontinued benzodiazepines it was found that they no longer met the diagnosis of general anxiety disorder and that patients no longer meeting the diagnosis of general anxiety disorder was higher in the group who received CBT. Thus CBT can be an effective tool to add to a gradual benzodiazepine dosage reduction program leading to improved and sustained mental health benefits.

Mood and Relaxation disorders

One etiological theory of depression is Aaron Beck's cognitive theory of depression. His theory states that depressed people think the way they do because their thinking is biased towards negative interpretations. According to this theory, depressed people acquire a negative schema of the world in childhood and adolescence as an effect of stressful life events. When the person with such schemata encounters a situation that in some way resembles the conditions in which the original schema was learned, the negative schemata of the person are activated.

Beck also described a negative cognitive triad, made up of the negative schemata and cognitive biases of the person; Beck theorized that depressed individuals make negative evaluations of themselves, the world, and the future. Depressed people, according to this theory, have views such as "I never do a good job," "It is impossible to have a good day," and "things will never get better." A negative schema helps give rise to the cognitive bias, and the cognitive bias helps fuel the negative schema. This is the negative triad. Also, Beck proposed that depressed people often have the following cognitive biases: arbitrary inference, selective abstraction, over-generalization, magnification and minimization. These cognitive biases are quick to make negative, generalized, and personal inferences of the self, thus fueling the negative schema.

Cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown as an effective treatment for clinical depression. A large-scale study in 2000 showed substantially higher results of response and remission (73% for combined therapy vs. 48% for either CBT or a particular discontinued antidepressant alone) when a form of cognitive behavior therapy and that particular discontinued anti-depressant drug were combined than when either modality was used alone.

For more general results confirming that CBT alone can provide lower but nonetheless valuable levels of relief from depression, and result in increased ability for the patient to remain in employment, see The Depression Report, which states: 100 people attend up to sixteen weekly sessions one-on-one lasting one hour each, some will drop out but within four months 50 people will have lost their psychiatric symptoms over and above those who would have done so anyway.

The American Psychiatric Association Practice Guidelines (April 2000) indicated that among psychotherapeutic approaches, cognitive behavioral therapy and interpersonal psychotherapy had the best-documented efficacy for treatment of major depressive disorder.

Sleep Disorders - Insomnia

Cognitive behavioral therapy has been found to be effective in reducing benzodiazepine usage in the treatment of insomnia. A large-scale trial utilizing CBT for chronic users of sedative hypnotics including nitrazepam, temazepam and zopiclone found the addition of CBT to improve outcome and reduce drug consumption in the treatment of chronic insomnia. Persisting improvements in sleep quality, sleep latency, and increased total sleep, as well as improvements in sleep efficiency and significant improvements in vitality and physical and mental health at 3-, 6- and 12-month follow-ups were found in those receiving cognitive behavioral therapy with hypnotics compared with those patients receiving hypnotics alone. A marked reduction in total sedative hypnotic drug use was found in those receiving CBT, with 33% reporting no hypnotic drug use. Authors of the study suggested that CBT is potentially a flexible, practical, and cost-effective treatment for the treatment of insomnia and that CBT administered coincident to hypnotic treatment leads to a reduction of benzodiazepine drug intake in a significant number of patients. Chronic use of hypnotic medications is not recommended due to their adverse effects on health and the risk of dependence. A gradual taper is usual clinical course in getting people off of benzodiazepines but even with gradual reduction a large proportion of people fail to stop taking benzodiazepines. The elderly are particularly sensitive to the adverse effects of hypnotic medications. A clinical trial in elderly people dependent on benzodiazepine hypnotics showed that the addition of CBT to a gradual benzodiazepine reduction program increased the success rate of discontinuing benzodiazepine hypnotic drugs from 38% to 77% and at 12 month follow-up from 24% to 70%. The paper concluded that CBT is an effective tool for reducing hypnotic use in the elderly and reducing the adverse health effects that are associated with hypnotics such as drug dependence, cognitive impairments and increased road traffic accidents.

A further study in older people with insomnia comparing the hypnotic drug zopiclone against CBT found that CBT actually improved EEG slow wave sleep as well as increased time spent asleep and found that the benefits were maintained at 6 month follow-up. Zopiclone however worsened sleep by suppressing slow wave sleep. A lack of slow wave sleep is linked to impaired functioning and sleepiness. Zopiclone reduced slow wave sleep and was similar to placebo in that it produced no lasting benefits after treatment had finished and at 6 month follow-up whilst CBT did have significant lasting benefits. The authors stated that CBT was superior to zopiclone both in the short term and in the long term. A comparison of CBT and the hypnotic drug zolpidem (Ambien) found similar results with CBT showing superiority and sustained benefits after long term follow up. Interestingly the addition of CBT and zolpidem offered no benefit over CBT alone.

CBT can help patients with severe mental disorders to make sense of experiences that lead to symptoms, and to associate key thoughts and feelings with factors that predispose to or precipitate them. For instance, it can help to make rational connections between precipitating causes such as stimulants or hallucinogenic drugs and symptoms such as psychotic episodes. With the help of a therapist, patients may even devise and carry out behavioral experiments that can help them to learn how to improve their quality of life.

CBT with children and adolescents

The use of CBT has been extended to children and adolescents with positive results. It is often used to treat major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, and symptoms related to trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder. Significant work has been done in this area by Mark Reinecke and his colleagues at Northwestern University in the Clinical Psychology program in Chicago. Paula Barrett and her colleagues have also validated CBT as effective in a group setting for the treatment of youth and child anxiety using the Friends Program she authored. This CBT program has been recognized as best practice for the treatment of anxiety in children by the World Health Organization. CBT has been used with children and adolescents to treat a variety of conditions with good success. CBT is also used as a treatment modality for children who have experienced complex posttraumatic stress disorder and chronic maltreatment.

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