Compos Mentis - Of Sound Mind | Austin Macauley Publishers

Have you ever suffered with your mental health?

Did you notice that all the CBT and self-help books, work in the longer term and want you to change your thinking?

And have you ever found that hard to do when you are feeling distressed in that moment?

Then this book is your answer!

Based on Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) which is a skills-based therapy designed to help you in that moment of distress. I have compiled a variety of skills based on this and on techniques I have learned over the years to help you the way they helped me.

Hi! my name is Lorna and I have written this book because what’s in here has helped me and I hope it will help you too.

I have Asperger’s (on the autistic spectrum) and I have also lived with and currently live with depression, anxiety, schizoaffective disorder and PTSD for a lot of my life. I developed these conditions as a result of some situations I had in my life. In 2013, when I was 17, I was admitted to psychiatric hospitals, and that is where I properly started to get help, and where I was first properly diagnosed with Asperger’s.

I found that talking therapies to start with did not help so much, for example CBT and just talking, because when I was in the moment of distress, I simply could not talk about it. This is when DBT (Dialectical Behavioural Therapy) was offered to me. This really helped, as it helped me deal with my emotions there and then so that I could settle and calm down, to then talk about the issues that were causing the distress.

Once I had a variety of different skills in my arsenal, that I could apply to many situations, and when I could also link the skills to take me to a calmer place, that was only then when the trauma work, talking therapies and CBT could really take effect.

I also found that there are a lot of self-help books out there based on CBT, but nothing for learning a skill to help you in the moment, so I have amalgamated all that I have learnt with DBT and other skills for learning difficulties and put it into this book.