Welcome to Italk: Lifting Low Mood Workshop

Welcome to italk: Lifting Low Mood Workshop

This booklet is designed to aid you in your recovery and help you to help yourself with the skills you will be learning throughout the workshop. The PWPs will provide you with the other parts of the workbook at each session. Please bring the workbook with you to each session.

The Lifting Low Mood Workshop is part of Step 2 of the italk service, which offers group and telephone based support to people who are experiencing symptoms of anxiety and/or low mood.
There will be six sessions of 1.5 hours each with a short break in the middle facilitated by two Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners (PWPs) from Italk. PWPs are specially trained to support people experiencing a range of common difficulties, including anxiety, panic, stress, phobias and low mood.

The workshop is different to group therapy – we will be working together using an approach called Guided Self-Help.

Guided Self Help is based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Through Guided Self Help you can gain a better understanding of the issues that are affecting you and will learn new skills to be able to make positive, practical changes. Guided Self Help strategies that we use at italk are evidence based and in line with NICE (National Institute Clinical Excellence) guidelines and recommendations.
In the sessions we will be focusing on introducing the skills, understanding why we might want to try using the skill and how we are hoping it is going to help with low mood.

The PWPs and the other members of the workshop are here to guide you and support you to learn new skills. There will be some work to do between the sessions and this is really important – we can talk to all day about things you could try which might help you to feel better but we won’t know what works for you unless you go home and give it a try and then come back and let us know how it went.

Therefore the PWPS will set a task to do at home at the end of each session and there will be a general discussion of how it went the following week.

During the workshop people will not be asked to share in-depth personal information or experiences. However, as there will be some group discussions, we would always encourage people to be mindful of how comfortable they feel to discuss personal information before sharing it. We would also ask everyone in the group to agree not to discuss any personal information they hear outside of the group.

We ask people to attend at least 4 out of the 6 sessions to get the most out of the workshop because the skills we will be looking at all work together to help with low mood.
You will be given a copy of the questionnaires to complete at each group session. These questionnaires are one of the ways we can measure your progress over time The PWPs will take the questionnaires back to the office in a locked box and they will be stored on our secure online system.

CONFIDENTIALITY: Anything that you tell the PWPs during the workshop will be confidential within the italk team and your GP. The only time italk would share information with anyone else would be if we were concerned for you, or someone that you mentioned, and we felt we needed to share information in order to keep you or that person safe. If this situation occurred we would try to talk to you first wherever possible.
If at any point during the course you feel treatment is not working for you, then let the PWPs know so that other options can be explored. If you have any questions about the tasks discussed then ask the PWPs for advice.

As the workshop is only six sessions, if at any point you feel unsafe and are thinking that you might do something to harm yourself please contact your GP as they will be able to access more immediate support for you. If it is outside GP working hours you can contact 111 or call Samaritans on 08457 90 9090.

The following parts of this booklet contain a summary of each group session, an outline of the skills you will learn and worksheets to complete tasks during sessions and at home. Therefore, please bring your workbook with you to each session.