First Steps News

Anxiety Support by email

First Steps to Freedom is running a pilot for email support on anxiety issues. The first email reply is free. Further emails will be replied to at a fee of £10 per month with a maximum of 1 reply per day (FSTF members only).  Please use our online contact form.

"Freaky Eaters"

BBC3's "Freaky Eaters" are looking for people to take part in a new series of programmes.

▪ Do you have an unusual eating problem which controls your life?

▪ Do you find many foods difficult to eat?

▪ Do your friends and family think your eating habits are weird?

▪ Are you at the end of your tether and desperate to sort out your diet?

Freaky Eaters is a series about people who live with unusual eating habits. Each week the resident nutritionist and psychologist offer advice and support to help individuals tackle their eating problems.  If you or someone you know would like to take part, please call 020 7907 0899 or email freakyeaters@betty.co.uk and leave a telephone number where you can be contacted. 

Help wanted

I am a producer working for the Department of Heath making short films for the NHS Choices website. I have been asked by the DH to look for someone who has successfully been through a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy,  who would consider being interviewed about their experiences for a video that will be displayed on the website with the medical advice about CBT.  
I would need the individual to be happy to be recognised, though we do not have to use their full name. The filming usually takes about 2 hours and involves an interview about the experiences of the contributor and how it affected their life. We also try and film them at home, or going about their lives, any hobbies they take part in etc. The final film will be about 3-4 minutes long.
There are some films on the NHS Choices website already, we have one about OCD with an ex sufferer and one is with Prof John Geddes about bipolar disorder. Any potential contributor could have a look at the films to see if it is something they would be interested in taking part in. I would not expect anyone to agree to take part until they had had a chat with me and were sure they were happy to do so. You can view all the films at nhs.uk/video.

Please contact First Steps if interested.

The Use of Mindfulness in the Treatment of OCD
by Jeffrey Schwartz MD

Mindfulness to put it as plainly as possible, is the ability to observe one’s own internal sensations with the calm clarity of an external witness. It has been described by the great Buddhist monk Nyanaponika as “the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to and in us, at the successive moments of perception”. The mental act of averting attention in this manner can enable sufferers of OCD and related problems to develop the insight necessary for consciously choosing new and more adaptive responses to the intrusive and intensely bothersome thoughts and urges which bombard their consciousness. As a practical matter, shifting one’s perspective in this way requires substantial and quite directed effort, especially when it is done in the presence of significant anxiety and fear. For that reason, in my book Brain Lock I developed Four Steps – Relabel, Reattribute, Refocus, Revalue – to help people working on OCD and related problems utilize mindfulness more effectively.

The Four Step approach to treatment is essentially an enhancement of traditional cognitive behavioral therapy methods. It involves systematically training people with OCD to recognize their symptoms as being related to brain biochemical imbalances that can be responded to adaptively and in ways that lead to improved function. A great deal of personal therapeutic empowerment occurs when OCD sufferers clearly realize that their symptoms are, in effect “false messages from the brain” which the medical condition OCD is causing them to experience and that they have the ability to willfully change their behavioral and emotional responses to these “false messages."

The goal of treatment is to learn to respond to these “false brain messages” in new and much more adaptive ways. This is accomplished through the utilization of techniques of behavioral refocusing, in which functional activities are systematically performed in place of habitual OCD responses. These cognitive-behavioral training techniques enable patients to utilize improved self-monitoring capabilities in order to more accurately interpret their symptoms, resulting in an improved ability to manage their emotional and behavioral responses to the intense anxiety they cause. This results in an enhanced ability to maintain attentional focus on the performance of consciously chosen adaptive behaviors, rather that capitulating to automaton like compulsive responses such as repetitive washing and checking, when besieged by the fearsome thoughts and urges of OCD.

Four Steps CD – Progressive Mindfulness £9.99
Brain Lock by Jeffrey M Schwartz (Book) £8.99
The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey M Schwartz (Book) £8.99

All obtainable from First Steps to Freedom