The central principle of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is that the ways in which an individual behaves and reacts to situations are determined by their interpretation of them.

The cognitive-behavioural approach is largely self-help, and the role of the clinician is to help you to understand how thoughts, beliefs and attitudes influence your feelings and behaviours, and teach you coping skills for dealing with different problems.

CBT helps you to become aware of inaccurate or negative thinking, so you can view challenging situations more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way.

During treatment, systematic discussions and carefully structured behavioural assignments are used to help you evaluate and modify your thoughts and behaviours. The treatment is time limited and mostly based on the here-and-now, and all aspects of therapy are made explicit to you. We work in a collaborative relationship in which we plan strategies to deal with clearly defined problems, for example to recover from panic attacks, phobias or depression.

There has been strong scientific evidence that CBT is a very effective treatment approach in alleviating a variety of psychological symptoms including anxiety disorders and depression and that it has longer-lasting results than medications.