My Clinical Psychologist Practice specialises in a number of areas (including counselling), but, please contact me to discuss your individual needs:
Most people go through periods of feeling down, but when you're depressed you feel persistently sad for weeks or months, rather than just a few days.
Some people think depression is trivial and not a genuine health condition. They're wrong – it is a real illness with real symptoms. Depression is not a sign of weakness or something you can "snap out of" by "pulling yourself together".
The good news is that with the right treatment and support, most people with depression can make a full recovery.
My clinical psychology practice in Balham delivers a range of proven psychological therapy approaches designed to treat depression and to help you get back to the life that you want for yourself.
Anxiety is what we feel when we are worried, tense or afraid – particularly about things that are about to happen, or which we think could happen in the future. Anxiety is a natural human response when we perceive that we are under threat. It can be experienced through our thoughts, feelings and physical sensations.
Though short term, manageable anxiety levels can be very helpful in certain situations, anxiety can however become problematic when it becomes chronic or excessive. Therapy and counselling can help you to develop healthier responses to the tensions and confrontations of modern life.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is the most popular form of therapy for a range of issues that fall under the umbrella term ‘anxiety’, using a solution-focused, ‘here and now’ approach to facilitate recovery.
At my clinical psychologist practice in Balham, this approach is supplemented with mindfulness-based approaches, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT).
While they can be a great source of love, enjoyment and support, at some point in our lives we all experience difficulties in our personal relationships. Misunderstandings and disagreements can escalate into persistent feelings of tension and discontentment.
Modern relationship counselling in no way seeks to place blame or pin a cause for problems upon any one person or group. The emphasis rather is on identifying the negative cycle particular to your relationship, which is often a bidirectional pattern of action and reaction.
Stress — of the right kind, at the right time, and in the right amount — can help you achieve objectives in life by stimulating your thought and creativity, and providing the energy boost you need to improve your performance. But if stress is maintained at a high level for too long, the exact opposite happens.
When you start being adversely affected by your stress, you may try to plug the gaps in the quality of your output by working harder…and becoming even more stressed, which actually leads to a poorer performance over time.
Approximately 1 in 4 people say they worry about how angry they sometimes feel. Excessive anger can be detrimental to your emotional, mental and physical health. We work to help you to develop more healthy, constructive ways to express anger.
Though we evolved with anger as an adaptive emotion, excessive anger is a growing—and much overlooked—problem in modern society. Psychological therapies such as CBT, ACT and mindfulness are proving helpful for resolving this ‘problem anger’.
As many as 80% of us have minor compulsions which don’t affect our everyday life in any major way. But someone with obsessive compulsive disorder — perhaps two to three per cent of us — can feel forced to perform certain actions in the same way, maybe many times, usually every day. Not doing so can cause great anxiety and preoccupation.
At my clinical psychologist practice in Balham, I use mindfulness-based therapies to encourage people to replace the distress and avoidance associated with obsessions with a non-judgemental awareness and an acceptance of their inner mental state. Evidence shows that this proves effective even in those who have been not been helped by other treatments.
© Dr. David J Gracey
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