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Therapy Workbook in the Cloud

Introduction to this resource

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This page is under construction. Content is likely to be revised significantly in the near future.

The goal of this resource is to allow and prompt psychotherapists around the world to share and get helpful, evidence-based psychoeducation material for free.

Psychoeducation is a key component in most forms of Evidence-Based Treatment. Indeed, many manualized treatments are disseminated together with their patient workbooks, which facilitate psychoeducation and maximize the availability of information to psychotherapy patients. However, workbooks are usually protected by copyright and unavailable to low-resource individuals and communities.

Considering the key importance of psychotherapy in treatment guidelines for mental disorders (for example, depression[1] and generalized anxiety disorder[2]), and the role of psychoeducation in most evidence-based treatments, the unavailability such material is at odds with the understanding of health (including mental health) as a human right, as recognized by the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

Fortunately, some therapy workbooks are already available for free (see the Similar External Resources section below). While acknowledging the amazingness of these resources, we believe that wikiversity-based material has very important strengths:

  • It is not only free to use (which is, of course, already cool!), but also free from copyright - thus allowing crowdsourcing from clinicians and mental health researchers and students around the world.
  • By being free from copyright, it is free to adapt and translate, and thus has enhanced scalability and accessibility.
  • By being inside Wikiversity, it is also linked to a bigger community of free-knowledge supporters and resources (allowing, for example, easy inclusion of links to Wikipedia articles on important subjects approached by the material).

Clinicians are strongly advised to read through all material that they eventually decide to recommend for their clients. In such case, it will probably be safer to share specific versions of the page with patients (by clicking "view history" and selecting the most current clinician-reviewed version). Clinicians and mental health students and researchers are also invited to collaborate to the improvement of this resource by expanding it and citing trusted, evidence-based sources.

Principles of This Resource

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  1. This workbook is general in nature, meaning that it does not mirror any particular, published treatment protocol (and thus is not a mere paraphrase of existing, copyright protected, therapy workbooks).
  2. Each piece of content inside this workbook is intended to be a standalone and flexible resource, meaning that it should not assume overly specific behaviors from the therapist or that a whole set of other techniques will necessarily be used in conjunction with it (which would limit its generalizability). With this, we do not mean that the resource cannot mention or establish expectations about therapist behavior - which is often useful. For example, in explaining in vivo exposure techniques, it is fair to assume that therapist and client will define situations to work on, based on the patient's previous avoidant behavior[3][4] (but it would probably be overly specific to define in which session this is done, how many situations will be selected, an so on). A useful heuristic for deciding what does "overly specific" mean may be asking yourself if such procedures are the same across at least two independent sources (i.e., sources with different authors).

List of Contents

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Similar External Resources

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Here we list some psychotherapy workbooks that are already available for free.

References

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  1. ↑ "Depression in adults: treatment and management". National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. 2022-06-29.
  2. ↑ "Generalised anxiety disorder and panic disorder in adults: management". National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. 2020-06-15.
  3. ↑ Hofmann, Stefan G.; Otto, Michael W. (2017-12-14). Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder: Evidence-Based and Disorder-Specific Treatment Techniques (in en) (2 ed.). Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315617039. ISBN 978-1-315-61703-9. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781317206743. 
  4. ↑ Foa, Edna B.; Hembree, Elizabeth Ann; Rothbaum, Barbara Olasov; Rauch, Sheila A. M. (2019). Prolonged exposure therapy for PTSD: emotional processing of traumatic experiences: therapist guide. Treatments that work (Second edition ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-092693-9. 
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