Mental Health issues such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, alcohol and drug addiction, suicide and the like following traumatic events have become troubling epidemics crippling western society requiring significant allocation of funds to address them.
The Australian experience has reached crisis point. In a 2019 investigation, The Australian Productivity Commission found that mental health complaints are costing the Australian economy approximately $500 million per day and called for “generational changes” to mitigate the problem despite increasing allocation of taxpayer funds to cover the cost of mental health services. Indeed, one in eight visits to the family doctor relates to mental health issues and presentations to hospital emergency departments have increased by 70% in the past decade. In addition, in a 2020 analysis, the Commission found people with major depression had high rates of unemployment in Australia of around 40%. However, the relationship of mental health and unemployment is complex with unemployment contributing both as a cause and a consequence of mental illness.
Also, the Commission report found that 75 per cent of those with a mental illness experience symptoms before the age of twenty-five and that the mental health system was inadequate to deal with many people seeking treatment who were presenting with symptoms too complex to be effectively managed by a GP with limited sessions provided for under Medicare. Despite billions being spent by governments all around the world each year to combat mental health issues within society, mental health scourges appear to be increasing rather than leveling out or decreasing.
In the last several decades there has been a push towards evidence based therapies to combat the increasing trends in mental health complaints whilst the application of evidence based treatments into practice has been slow. Consequently, those most in need of treatment have not been able to access innovative evidence based treatments which have not permeated through to mainstream practices. This study is aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of the clinical application of Self Empowerment theory in the form of Single Session Self Empowerment Therapy in the treatment of anxiety and depression associated with PTSD.
Research at The Australian Trauma Research Institute over the past two decades has yielded promising results in reducing the cost to the public purse and potentially improving the individuals’ mental health and general wellbeing. Conventional interventions for health or psychological symptom management require multiple individual or group consultations which are costly, time consuming often inaccessible or unfeasible, thus often leaving depression untreated.
Research shows that that regardless of therapy used, nature and severity of the presenting problem and diagnosis, the modal frequency of patients attending counselling services is 1 (Talmon, M.,1990; Bloom, B.L., 2001; Young, J., 2018).
With this in mind, Self Empowerment Theory and its application, Self Empowerment Therapy (SET) was developed by the author (Kaye, D., 2021). The theory is based on four core assumptions:
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We know ourselves better than anybody else.
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People are not disturbed by things but by their powerlessness to change them.
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We don’t have a multitude of problems in our lives but a problem pattern that permeates our life domains in counterproductive, pathological and predictable ways.
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The unique problem pattern that permeates our life domains has exponential and cumulative features and emerges as our personality evolves, especially in the formative and developmentally sensitive transition periods from childhood to adolescence and adolescence to adulthood and is the byproduct of skills deficits and our inability to reconcile discrepancies within the self, leading to significant disintegration between actual, ought, ideal and undesirable components of the self.
The primary goal of SET is helping individuals empower themselves to reclaim aspects of their lives that have been lost to depression and PTSD. Therefore, Self Empowerment Theory suggests that as well as uncovering the problem pattern permeating our life domains, we need to adopt cognitive and lifestyle restructuring micro- strategies to regulate the discrepancies between various components of the self to create an integrated, functioning, resilient, desirable and productive self.
This is especially complicated by traumatic events as the impact permeates the effected person’s health, family, relationships, profession, education, finances and self, life-domains. Single Session SET, constituting assessment and intervention is directed at creating shifts in the individuals’ cognitive processing and lifestyle factors which maintain and perpetuate undesirable aspects of their life domains (Kaye, D., 2021).
Objective
The objective of this study was to look at effectiveness of SET as a single session in the treatment of depression associated with PTSD amongst patients referred to an specialist outpatient clinic by their primary treating doctor for treatment of depression associated with PTSD as a result of car and work accidents.
Design
a two hour single therapy session consisting of recording baseline measures of health, family, relationships, profession, education, finances and self, life-domains, administration of four clinical exercises incorporating psycho-education and skills acquisition (Self Differentiation Exercise, Desert Island Fantasy Exercise, Picture Perfect Discrepancy Exercise and Linear Comparison Exercise) as outlined in Self Empowerment Therapy: From Theory to Practice (Kaye, D., 2021), questionnaire administration and results analysis design with no follow up assessment post single session.