Celebrating Compassionate Focused Therapy this World Bipolar Day

To coincide with World Bipolar Day (30 March), our Bipolar Services team was joined by service users and mental health specialists at the Midlands Arts Centre, to celebrate the findings of a project investigating Compassionate Focused Therapy (CFT) for adults diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

In 2019, Professor Paul Gilbert’s Compassionate Focused Therapy (CFT) principles were trailed at BSMHFT with select service users. CFT helps us to understand, and work with, our tricky brains, it builds our abilities to use our bodies to support our minds and develop the courage and wisdom to address our difficulties. The therapy also teaches the mind to be helpful, not harmful, being aware of negative voices that we can speak to ourselves in - paying a particular attention to the tone of the inner voice.

Results from the trial were encouraging and our Bipolar Services team and the Compassionate Mind Foundation are considering next steps in terms of future collaborations.

Mandy Scott was one of the select few service users to have received CFT, reflecting on her experience she said: "Looking back, CFT helped me to accept and recognise how I was feeling... I used to feel confused and frustrated and give myself a hard time as I didn't know what was behind the tears."

Our Bipolar Services team was initially set up by Dr Sandra George (Clinical Psychologist) in the late 1990s following her recognition of the need for a specialist approach to help support people whose mood fluctuations significantly impacted on their lives.

Fast forward to today, the service is a multidisciplinary team that aims to help support people who are struggling with problematic fluctuations of high and low mood. The service provides psychological interventions alongside other treatments offered by their community teams. The team offer a programme called Mood on Track that is tailored to suit each service user’s individual needs. They can also offer family work and cognitive behavioural therapy following this.

Cassandra Wilkins, another service user supported by the Bipolar Service team commented: "Mood on Track and the Compassionate Focused Therapy has helped me in my everyday life, using it to parent my children... whenever they approach me with a problem, I can instantly feel the compassionate mind starting to work in me."

If you or a loved one is struggling with significant mood changes, please remember, you are not alone.

Reach out to your local GP in the first instance.

Please note, you must be under the care of a Community Mental Health Teams (CMHT) in order to be referred to the bipolar service.

Further information about bipolar disorder can be found on the Bipolar UK website.