An assessment at OHSPIC will include a detailed discussion of:

• Your current difficulties
• How they might have developed and how they have affected you over time
• Previous therapy you may have attended and what it involved
• Any medication you are taking and/or have taken in the past
• Your goals for treatment

It will also include some standardised questionnaires to assess the severity of the problem, how it impacts on daily life, what thoughts and beliefs are associated with the problem, and an assessment of other difficulties.

The treatment offered at OHSPIC is cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). CBT is a talking therapy based on the idea that thoughts, feelings, behaviour (what we do), and how our bodies feel are all connected. If we change one of these then we can alter the others.

Watch this short video to find out more from the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP): What is CBT?

CBT is a collaborative therapy, a way of working together on mutually agreed goals. Therapy involves discussing your difficulties to arrive at a shared understanding of your problems, including what might have contributed to these problems and what could be keeping them going.

This shared understanding is then used to guide experimenting with different ways of thinking and doing things. The aim is to help someone make changes, develop useful skills, and acquire psychological tools to improve their life, maintain the changes achieved in CBT, and build on this progress on their own.

CBT works well because it is based on evidence from research and clinical practice. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) regularly reviews the evidence for effective treatment of different problems and publishes guidelines for addressing each problem based on this evidence.

CBT is recommended in many of these guidelines and is provided by the NHS for many problems. If you would like to read more about the specific guidelines for a particular problem, please visit www.nice.org.uk.