Video Description

Elena Touroni, a Chelsea-based private psychologist, discusses the most effective technique for dealing with phobias – where people are gradually exposed to the thing that bothers them until their anxiety decreases. https://www.thechelseapsychologyclinic.com Chelsea Psychology Clinic are a group of London psychologists and psychiatrists offering private psychological therapy and psychiatry treatment from their premises across central London and Chelsea. The private therapy sessions cover the following areas: – Acceptance & Commitment Therapy – Cognitive Analytic Therapy – Cognitive-behavioural Therapy – Couples Therapy – Dialectical-behaviour Therapy – Mentalisation Based Treatment – Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy – Schema Therapy

Video Transcription

We call exposure response prevention, which is extremely anxiety-provoking to begin with. So we do something very, very gradual. So over time we will, for instance, take a phobia such a spider phobia. The way you would deal with a phobia like that would be that, in the beginning you might expose someone to the photograph of a spider. So it would be in a very controlled way and you would get them to rate their anxiety. And you would get them to sort of be able to tolerate gradually to look at a spider in a photograph, to the point of their anxiety really decreases to very manageable levels. And then we would up it by them perhaps seeing a spider that is inside a glass, that you don’t actually have to be with on your own. And we would build essentially a graded hierarchy off the person that being exposed to something that is as least anxiety-provoking, but a little bit anxiety-provoking as possible such as a photograph, to actually the person being able to tolerate being in the same room with a spider on their own, for instance. And that is called systematic desensitisation, it’s extremely effective.